Representing Youth: Mentions and Representative Claims about Young People in the European Parliament

Youth are underrepresented in parliaments and cabinets across the European Union and its Member States. This descriptive gap is often mirrored by a substantive one, as policy agendas and outcomes tend to prioritize older cohorts. As societies age, these dynamics risk further marginalizing the substantive interests of youth within the democratic system. Research into whether and to what extent youth are represented is emerging, but existing approaches, measuring how often representatives engage with youth issues through parliamentary questions or speeches, have identified who talks about youth without establishing whether that talk represents youth or just refers to them. Drawing on the representative claims approach, which conceptualizes representation as a performative process of claim-making, the study distinguishes representative claims about youth, in which speakers construct a representative linkage to the group, from mentions that leave youth discursively present but unrepresented, or that speak against them. Using manual content analysis of parliamentary speeches from the 7th to the 9th European Parliament (2009–2024), sampled through a validated keyword dictionary, this paper investigates the extent to which youth are mentioned, whether these mentions amount to representative claims, and the conditions under which such claims emerge by analyzing variation across debate topics, party families, committee membership, and representatives' age, gender, ideology, and tenure. In doing so, the study offers an empirical account of when and under what conditions representative claims about youth occur in the European Parliament.