Established democracies are confronted with low turnout-levels among young citizens. Since age-related inequality in political participation has increased in the last decades, political measures to counter the phenomenon are of central interest. Young voters’ reluctance to vote in national elections has been explained by their underprivileged social position. Young citizens are less likely to vote because of life-cycle effects and generation specific peculiarities. However, there is huge unexplained crosscountry variation in young citizens’ turnout, ranging between 18% in Switzerland and 81% in Sweden. This suggests that there are significant differences in the extent to which age affects participation. This steers the attention towards the contextual factors affecting young citizens’ political behaviour. This paper will assess to what extent participation is affected by welfare provisions and electoral institutions (i.e. voting procedure, compulsory voting, voting facilities, voting advice applications). We hypothesize, for instance, that voting facilities such as absentee voting and favourable welfare provisions foster the participation of young voters. We operationalize these hypotheses by means of multilevel analysis and cross-level interactions. The analysis will be based on the three waves of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES), because it offers the opportunity to investigate young citizens’ participation over countries and time (across generations).
