Commissioned Book Review: Daniel Stockemer and Aksel Sundström, Youth Without Representation: The Absence of Young Adults in Parliaments, Cabinets, and Candidacies
| Published date | 01 November 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14789299221146688 |
| Author | Brit Anlar |
| Date | 01 November 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Commissioned Book Review |
Political Studies Review
2023, Vol. 21(4) NP9 –NP10
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Commissioned Book Review
1146688PSW0010.1177/14789299221146688Political Studies ReviewCommissioned Book Review
book-review2023
Commissioned Book Review
Youth Without Representation:
The Absence of Young Adults in
Parliaments, Cabinets, and Candidacies
by Daniel Stockemer and Aksel
Sundström. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2022. 206 pp. $70.00
(hardback), $24.95 (paperback).
ISBN: 9780472075171.
Research on young people and politics is
not new, in fact, for at least the past two
decades scholars have been keen to under-
stand young people’s political engagement,
especially as voters and as participants in
social movements. Similarly, they have
been interested in understanding how to
increase young people’s engagement, espe-
cially through civic education initiatives
and early socialization. While this research
agenda is rich, Youth Without Representa-
tion offers a fresh perspective, namely, the
underrepresentation of young adults in for-
mal political institutions.
In this volume, Stockemer and Sundström
argue that the underrepresentation of young
people in formal political institutions is a
democratic deficit and that it may be an
essential factor in young adults’ alienation
from formal politics. Yet we do not yet
fully understand the magnitude of young
adults’ underrepresentation, and as a result,
we cannot know the extent to which
these phenomena are related (chapter 2).
As such, the authors offer the first global
account of the magnitude and mechanisms
behind young people’s underrepresentation
within political parties, parliaments, exec-
utive cabinets and candidacies.
The underlying assumption of the
book is that young people are a cohesive,
politically marginalized group that deserves
greater representation. The authors’ careful
consideration of arguments for young adults
and their greater representation in their the-
oretical chapter (chapter 2) offers an impor-
tant normative and theoretical starting point
for the investigation of youth adults’ under-
representation and its impacts.
In their empirical chapters, Stockemer
and Sundström undertake an ambitious
research agenda including the largest anal-
ysis of age representation in national par-
liaments (131 parliaments) (chapter 3), the
first study of variations in young adults’
representation among party delegates in
parliaments (chapter 4) and within cabinets
including an account of ministerial port-
folios (chapter 5), use the Comparative
Candidate Survey to Compare older and
younger candidates across 18 European
countries (chapter 6), and an in-depth
comparative case study of Sweden and
Switzerland to further uncover the factors
that promote/hinder young adults’ repre-
sentation (chapter 7). These empirical
chapters offer many significant findings,
but four are worth highlighting.
First, counter to extant literature which
claims that young people lack political
ambition and that they do not run for office,
the authors find that young people are not
less likely to run for political office than
their older counterparts. In fact, young
adults tend to be overrepresented as candi-
dates, but often go unelected either as a
result of being placed in unwinnable seats
or voter bias. Second, young people’s
underrepresentation has remained a con-
sistent feature of political institutions for
the last several decades, indicating that this
is not just a problem of ‘today’s youth’ but
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