(Over)representing the Future’s Most Affected. Recruitment and Representativeness of Young People in Citizens’ Assemblies

While traditional representative democratic bodies tend to descriptively and substantively underrepresent young people (Helliesen, 2022; Angelucci et al., 2025), deliberative minipublics (DMPs), such as citizens’ assemblies (CAs), are considered to better represent the interests of future generations by facilitating long-term thinking in political decision-making (MacKenzie, 2018; Kulha et al., 2021). Strengthening the voice of future generations is particularly important in making decisions on global crises, which will likely affect those living in the future more than current adults. Their perspectives can be represented in citizens’ assemblies by including in deliberation the interests of “imaginary future generations” (Kamijo et al., 2017) or incorporating mental time travel exercises (Kulha et al., 2021), which allow participants to imagine the challenges facing those living in the future. Another way is to directly involve participants whose significant part of life will occur in succeeding decades and who will thus be most impacted by future developments, i.e., current children and youth. CAs, composed of randomly selected participants representative of the general population, are commissioned to deliberate on issues that will shape today’s youth and children’s future. While most CAs tend to include young participants who are eligible voters proportionally to their share of the general population (Ohren, 2024), some CAs seek to strengthen their voice by overrepresenting them or organizing assemblies that consist exclusively of children and young people to address issues specific to these age groups. However, young people are not a homogeneous group, and the representation of their diversity is crucial when designing youth-centered deliberative processes. Representativeness of the group makeup, meaning that the composition of the assembly mirrors all relevant attributes of the general population (Junius, 2024; Mansbridge, 1999), grants citizens’ assemblies the legitimacy of political decisions made by a randomly selected and demographically representative group of citizens (Fishkin, 2009). If organizers of CAs involving future generations want to make convincing representative claims (Ohren, 2024), they should avoid reproducing inequalities present in other deliberative processes, such as the overrepresentation of the better-off, more politically active, higher-educated, and majority ethnic-group individuals. Recruitment of young people poses a unique challenge (Nishiyama, 2023), which is why some CAs employ alternative methods to those used for the random selection of adult CA participants. In this article, the authors propose a typology of youth selection and representation methods in CAs, based on document analysis of assembly materials and in-depth interviews with organizers of European youth-centered CAs. The paper identifies 9 types that employ different forms of representation: youth-exclusive representation, overrepresentation of youth, and proportional representation, as well as different forms of recruitment strategies: random selection, indirect random selection, and self-selection. Finally, a comparative analysis of selected in-depth cases reveals the consequences of the applied recruitment methods for the representativeness of the group composition, motivations guiding the organizers’ choice of a specific model, and the challenges they faced in ensuring the representativeness of the process.