Do Young People vote for Younger Parties? Electoral behavior and descriptive representation of younger generations in Europe

Young people are systematically underrepresented in European parliaments, yet comparatively little attention has been devoted to investigating the effects of the age composition of parties’ lists on electoral behavior. Drawing on the literatures on descriptive representation, affinity voting, and post-materialist value change, this paper develops and tests three empirical hypotheses using a novel stacked dataset combining the European Election Studies of 2019 and 2024 with expert survey and candidate-level data across twelve EU member states. The empirical analysis does not support any of the three hypotheses in their strict form. While younger voters display a modest preference for parties with younger candidates and GAL programmatic positions, these patterns are not distinctively generational because they are shared with other age groups. The findings suggest that the electoral behavior of younger generations in contemporary Europe may be less distinctively generational than existing theoretical frameworks have assumed.