How Young Belgian MPs Perform and Conceptualise “Good Representation”: A Comparative Analysis Across the Linguistic Divide

Over the past decades, scholars and policymakers have become increasingly concerned with citizens’ growing disengagement from formal political processes. Especially youth are regarded as one of the most disengaged groups in politics, putting them at the centre of scholarly work on the representative disconnect between citizens and their elected representatives. One prevailing explanation for this disconnect is that European representatives do not adequately reflect the socio-demographic composition of society (cf. Phillips 1995; Young 1999). Despite some progress over the past decades, young people continue to be severely under-represented in European parliaments and executives, and senior citizens almost exclusively occupy positions of political power. Whilst the descriptive under-representation of youth has been extensively documented (e.g., Tremmel 2006; Belschner & Garcia De Paredes, 2021; Krook & Nugent, 2018; Stockemer & Sundström, 2018; Sundström & Stockemer, 2019, 2021), limited scholarly attention has been given to the experiences of young parliamentarians once elected to the office. Drawing on an original dataset of young MP interviews (collected by the REDIRECT project “REpresentative DIsconnect Diagnosis, and strategies for RECTification”), this paper examines what young parliamentarians in Belgium (from political parties across the linguistic divide) conceive their representative mandate to look like, how they define “good representation,” and how they deal with the opportunities and challenges (e.g., citizen dissatisfaction, social media, the functioning of political parties and parliaments) that shape their working context, and individual functioning. The experiences and perspectives of these key practitioners are used to further diagnose the nature of “representative disconnect” and identify pathways and opportunities for its repair.