“In the Eye of the Practitioner”: A Comparative Study of Young MPs Across Europe and Their Views on What Makes for a Good Representative

This paper analyses what young politicians across three European countries (Belgium, France and the United Kingdom) understand political representation to mean, how they define what makes for a “good representative,” and what the performance thereof entails. The paper draws on an original dataset of semi-structured interviews conducted with young parliamentarians and local level politicians in 8 European countries (REDIRECT project “REpresentative DIsconnect Diagnosis, and strategies for RECTification”). It presents preliminary findings on young politicians’ conceptions of “the good representative” and compares the key virtues and characteristics advanced by politicians across three national contexts and discusses how politicians’ accounts are shaped by national political cultures, political ideology, and individual-level characteristics (e.g., gender, ethnicity, age cohort). By unpacking young practitioners’ views on and experiences with performing political representation, the paper seeks to bring two strands of literature into closer conversation, more specifically, the literature on youth representation and research on the ethics of political representation. 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 office. Work on representation ethics (e.g., Dovi, 2006; Severs and Dovi; 2018; Dovi, 2018; Rubenstein et al. 2018) is, then again, predominantly theoretical and does not consider practitioners’ experiences and how everyday challenges shape and restrain their working context and individual functioning.