Representing Youth: How Representatives Portray 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. While research into whether and to what extent youth are represented is emerging, there is no research exploring to what extent youth are mentioned and how youth are portrayed by representatives in their political discourse. Drawing on the constructivist literature in representation research, which conceptualizes representation as a performative process of claim-making, this study examines portrayals of youth, defined as the specific characteristics and agency attributed to them, to reveal how representatives discursively construct this group in their parliamentary speeches. Using automated and manual content analysis of parliamentary speeches from the 7th to the 9th European Parliament (2009–2024), this paper investigates the extent to which youth appear, how they are portrayed, and the conditions under which different portrayals emerge by analyzing variation across policy areas, party families, member states, and representatives’ age, gender, and tenure. Further examined are also whether these portrayals are associated with representative claims and the specific scope (national, transnational, or supranational) in which these portrayals are situated. In doing so, the study offers new insights into the discursive and performative patterns of youth representation in the European Parliament and provides a deeper understanding of the discursive and performative mechanisms that contribute to the underrepresentation of youth in an aging democratic system.