Youth without Representation

Front matter

without

THE ABSENCE OF YOUNG ADULTS IN PARLIAMENTS, CABINETS, AND CANDIDACIES

Daniel Stockemer and Aksel Sundstrom

Chapter 2. Why We Need Increased Youth Representation 2.1

2.2.

2.3.

2.4.

2:5.

2.6.

2.7.

2.8.

Youth: An Important Group of Study

The Importance of Group Representation for Youth 2.2.1. Five Criteria for Why Young Adults Need Descriptive Representation

Benefits and Costs of Increased Descriptive Representation of Youth

The Vicious Cycle of Political Alienation 2.4.1. Youths’ Lack of Political Interest and Knowledge 2.4.2. Youths’ Lack of Conventional Political Participation

The Threefold Link between Young Adults’ Low Political Interest and Knowledge, Their Low Electoral Participation, and Their Lack of Representation in Office

The Endemic Nature of the Vicious Cycle of Youths’ Political Alienation

Increased Youth Representation: One Way to Break the

Vicious Cycle of Youth Alienation

2.7.1. The Link between Greater Numbers of Young Candidates and Higher Youth Turnout

2.7.2. The Degree to Which Young Politicians Represent Young Voters

2.7.3. The Degree to Which Young Politicians Support Policiess Important to Young Adults

The Youth Representation Literature and Our Contribution

34 35

35 40 vi Contents

Chapter 3. Youths’ Underrepresentation in National Parliaments 3.1. The Magnitude of Youths’ Underrepresentation in Parliament

3.2. Youth Representation in Legislatures over Time in Australia, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom

3.3. Explanatory Factors for the Variation in Youth Representation across Countries 3.3.1. Institutional Determinants of Youth Representation 3.3.2. Socioeconomic and Cultural Determinants of Youth Representation

3.4. Research Design 3.5. Results

Chapter 4. Youth Representation across Party Delegations in Parliament 4.1. Youths’ (under) Representation across Party Delegations

4.2. Young Adults in Australian, German, French, and British Party Delegations over Time

4.3. Explanatory Factors for the Variation in Youth Representation across Parties

4.4. Research Design 4.5. Results

Chapter 5. Young Politicians in Cabinet 5.1. The Magnitude of Youths’ Underrepresentation in Cabinet

5.2. Youth Representation in Cabinet over Time in Australia, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom

5.3. Explanatory Factors for the Variation in Youth Representation in Cabinet across Countries

5.4. Research Design 5.5. Results 5.6. Cabinet Portfolios of Young Ministers

43 43

52 52

56 60 62 64

67 67

78 83 84 87

89 89

98 101 102 104

Contents vii

Chapter 6. Youth as Candidates and Elected Representatives 109 6.1. Comparing Candidates and Elected Representatives 109

6.2. The Average and Median Age of (Unsuccessful) Candidates and Elected Parliamentarians 110

6.3. The Share of Young (Unsuccessful) Candidates and Legislators 112

6.4. The Age Factor in Explaining the Success of Candidates 117 6.4.1. Research Design and Methods 117 6.4.2. Results 119

6.5. Characteristics of Young and Older Candidates 122

6.6. Electoral Capital of Young(er) and Old(er) Successful Candidates 126

Chapter 7. Explaining (More) Variation in Youth Representation:

Insights from an Original Survey in Sweden and Switzerland 130 7.1. Added Value of an Original Survey with MPs and Candidates in Sweden and Switzerland 130 7.2. Methods 132 7.3. Quantitative and Qualitative Insights of Our Survey 135 7.3.1. Should There Be a Correspondence in the Age Structure of Parliaments and Populations? 135 7.3.2. Are There Systematic Disadvantages of Our Age Group in the Nomination of Candidates to the Two Parliaments? 137 7.3.3. Have Respondents Witnessed Any Age-Based Discrimination in Nominations? 141 7.3.4. Should There Be a Larger Number of Young MPs? 143 7.4. Youth in the Swedish Riksdag: Some Positive Signs but Still a Long Way to Full Acceptance 147 7.5. Youth in the Swiss National Council: Still the Exception Rather Than the Rule 150 7.6. Propositions to Increase Youth Representation 153 Chapter 8. Conclusions 156 References 165 Index 183

Digital materials related to this title can be found on the Fulcrum platform via the following citable URL https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11459940

List of Figures

Figure 1. The age distribution in parliaments and the age distribution among voters

Figure 2. The vicious cycle of political alienation of young adults

Figure 3. The age distribution in parliaments across the globe in or around 2019

Figure 4. The percent of MPs aged 35 years or under in legislatures across the globe

Figure 5. The percent of MPs aged 40 years or under in legislatures across the globe

Figure 6. The median age of MPs across the globe

Figure 7. The mean age of MPs in Australia, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom across time

Figure 8. The median age of MPs in Australia, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom across time

Figure 9. The percent of MPs aged 35 or under in Australia, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom across time

Figure 10. The percent of MPs aged 40 or under in Australia, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom across time

Figure 11. The age distribution of MPs across party delegations in 52 countries in or around 2019

Figure 12. The median age of MPs in the main Australian party delegations to parliament across time

Figure 13. The percent of MPs aged 40 years or under in the main Australian party delegations across time

Figure 14. The median age of MPs in the main German party delegations across time

Figure 15. The percent of MPs aged 40 years or under in the main German party delegations across time

Figure 16. The median age of MPs in the main party delegations in the United Kingdom across time

Figure 17. The percent of MPs aged 40 years or under in the main party delegations in the United Kingdom across time x List of Figures

Figure 18. The age distribution in cabinets across the globe in or around 2019

Figure 19. The median age of cabinet ministers across the globe in or around 2019

Figure 20. The percent of cabinet ministers aged 35 years or under across the globe in or around 2019

Figure 21. The percent of cabinet ministers aged 40 years or under across the globe in or around 2019

Figure 22. The mean age of cabinet ministers in Australia, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom across time

Figure 23. The median age of cabinet ministers in Australia, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom across time

Figure 24. The percent of cabinet ministers aged 35 or under in Australia, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom across time

Figure 25. The percent of cabinet ministers aged 40 or under in Australia, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom across time

Figure 26. The probability of election for different operationalizations of age (bivariate model)

Figure 27. The probability of election for different operationalizations of age (multivariate model)

List of Tables

Table 1. Schematic illustration of when to accept the costs of descriptive representation

Table 2. The influence of age on the voting records in favor of stricter environmental protection among members of the U.S. House of Representatives (Tobit regression analysis)

Table 3. Countries with the youngest parliaments

Table 4. Youth reservation and quota schemes in legislatures across the globe

Table 5. Multiple regression models measuring the effect of national-level factors on youth representation in parliaments

Table 6. Development of the median age and the share of MPs aged 40 or under in French party delegations

Table 7. Multiple regression models measuring the effect of party factors on youth representation in political parties

Table 8. Countries with the youngest cabinets

Table 9. Multiple regression models measuring the effect of national factors on youth representation in cabinet

Table 10. Typology of high prestige, medium prestige, and low prestige portfolios

Table 11. Classification of inner versus outer portfolios

Table 12. The mean and median age across high-, medium-, and low-prestige portfolios

Table 13. The mean and median age across inner circle and outer circle portfolios

Table 14. Youth and the prestige of the portfolio

Table 15. Youth and the prestige of the portfolio, alternative classification

Table 16. The median age of (unsuccessful) candidates and elected representatives

Table 17. The mean age of (unsuccessful) candidates and elected representatives

85 92

105 105

106 106 xii List of Tables

Table 18. The percent of unsuccessful and successful candidates aged 35 years or under

Table 19. The percent of (unsuccessful) candidates and legislators aged 40 or under

Table 20. Political interest of the 35 years old or under in Sweden and Switzerland

Table 21. Bivariate logistic regression analyses measuring the influence of age on a candidate’s chance of winning a seat in parliament

Table 22. Multiple logistic regression models measuring the effect of individual factors on a candidate’s chances of winning a seat in parliament

Table 23. The electoral capital of candidates across various age brackets (responses in percent)

Table 24. The party capital of candidates across various age brackets

(responses in percent)

Table 25. Endorsements across various age brackets (responses in percent)

Table 26. Successful candidates by electoral capital (responses in absolute numbers)

Table 27. Descriptive statistics of our sample of MPs and candidates in Sweden and Switzerland

Table 28. Distribution of answers to the question whether the age distribution in parliament should correspond to the age distribution in the general population

Table 29. Answers to the question whether any age group is systematically disadvantaged

Table 30. Answers to the question whether the respondent has witnessed any age-based discrimination

Table 31. Answers to the question whether there should be a higher number of young MPs in the national parliament

Table 32. Suggestions on how to improve youths’ political representation

Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge generous support from the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung Canada Office, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Swedish Research Council.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

I think the old age of legislators is a problem. We have the world’s largest generation ever of adolescents and youth. So if decisions are being made

by an age cohort that is decades above that and is not attuned to their perspective I think it’s a serious democratic deficit. I used to be of the view that people needed to come in to parliaments with some degree of maturity and background. I actually no longer think that. I think a parliament is a place where young people with fresh perspectives should be. And I think our political system should accommodate that.

(HELEN CLARK, FORMER NEW ZEALAND PRIME MINISTER, INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHORS)

The political elite in most countries is conceived mainly of wealthy, educated, and senior men of the dominant ethnicity. National parliaments and cabinets are arenas that fit this description: they “include more of the affluent than the less well-off, more men than women, more middle-aged than young, and more white-collar professionals than blue-collar workers” (Norris 1997, 6). In particular, young citizens are an “excluded majority” (IPU 2014), with an insufficient presence. People under the age of 35 represent more than half of today’s world population, but in political office, whether elected or appointed, youth are a clear minority. For example, our own calculations of a global sample of national parliaments show that young people aged 18 to 35 years are not even represented at a ratio of one to three when we compare their presence in parliament with their share of the general population. In cabinets, this ratio is even less favorable for youth, nearly one to ten. We argue in this book that this discrepancy is a democratic deficit. The United States of America (U.S.) is the prime, but certainly not the only, example of a polity with senior leaders, where the political class is not representative of the population. At the end of 2021, some of the most important politicians are beyond 65 years of age. The president, Joe Biden, is 79 years old; the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, is 71 years; the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, is 79 years old; and the speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, is 80 years old. In November 2020, Americans had the choice between two presidential candidates in their 70s, the incumbent Donald Trump and his challenger Joe Biden. Given that Biden’s toughest primary contender, Bernie Sanders, was also in his late 70s, the magazine The Atlantic described the presidential race in March 2020 as follows: “We have now before us three candidates divided by ideology, but united in dotage. All three white men were born in the 1940s, before the invention of Velcro and the independence of India and Israel. Amazingly, each is currently older than any of the past three U.S. presidents.”’ The seniority of politicians goes beyond the figureheads of the two main parties. The 117th Congress of the United States (January 2021 to January 2023) is one of the oldest to have ever served. The average American was about 20 years younger than the average representative in the United States’ lower house, who was 58 years old at the time of the swearing-in of Congress in early 2021.

Yet the old age of politicians is not only a feature of the United States. Rather, several of the largest democracies are real gerontocracies, political systems in which older people have better chances of attaining leadership positions and are largely overrepresented in such seats (Magni-Berton and Panel 2021). In India, for example, the world’s most populated democracy, the median age of the population is 28 years old. However, the median age of members in the lower house of the Indian Parliament, the Lok Sabha, and the cabinet was almost 57 years as of 2021.” Japan is another “silver democracy” (referring to the dominant hair color in the Japanese Diet), considering that youth are literally absent in this elected assembly (see Sota 2018). The day of the constitution of the parliament in 2017, young parliamentarians 35 years or under made up only 2.6 percent of the legislature, and parliamentarians 40 years or under 7.8 percent. In Prime Minister Abe’s cabinet, there was not a single minister aged 40 or under at the time of its formation in 2017.

In several countries in less economically developed parts of the world, including Namibia and Angola, the gap in the age distribution between members of parliament (MPs) and citizens is even larger. In Namibia, for example, the median age of the population was around 21 years old in 2019, while the median age of MPs was 59 years old. On average, cabinet members in this African country were 2.5 years older than their counterparts in parliament. In Angola, the gap is even more pronounced. The median age

1. Thomson, D. “Why Do Such Elderly People Run America? Sanders is too old. So is Biden. Trump too?” The Atlantic, March 5, 2020. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ archive/2020/03/why-are-these-people-so-freaking-old/607492/

2. See http://164.100.47.194/Loksabha/Members/MemberSearchByA ge.aspx

Introduction 3 among citizens was 16 years in 2015; as such, the majority of the population did not have the right to vote. In contrast, the median age of parliamentarians in 2015 was 63.5 years. Cabinet members were slightly younger (i.e., the median and mean age was both 61.5 years). Nevertheless, this leaves us with a stunning age difference of 45 years between the median age in the population and the median age of their appointed leaders.

The stylized figure below (fig. 1) illustrates the visible absence of young adults in parliaments. The size of each horizontal block displays the number of people in a certain age category in a setting that mimics the average country today (roughly based on our parliamentary dataset). By visualizing the numerical distribution across age cohorts, the figure illustrates that there is a clear discrepancy in the ratio between young adults in the population and young adults in office. In many countries, they are often the largest cohort in the population of eligible voters yet the smallest one in the legislature in terms of their descriptive presence. If we were to draw the same figure for cabinets, the age distribution would be even more detrimental for young adults as ministers.

In this book, we focus on the marginalization of young adults in politics, taking a comparative focus on legislatures, cabinets, and candidacies for office. Normatively, our starting point is that a democracy or any system of government cannot flourish if it systematically excludes one cohort of the adult population. In the words of Scharpf (1999, 6), “[p]olitical choices are legitimate if they reflect the ‘will of the people’—that is, if they can be derived from the authentic preferences of the members of a community” We deduct from this statement that young adults ought to be present in assemblies to a larger extent than they are contemporarily. Theoretically, we embed youths’ lack of political representation within a framework, which we label the vicious cycle of political alienation, between declining political interest of the young, their lack of conventional political participation, and their inadequate representation in political office. Empirically, we display the magnitude of this underrepresentation and explain variation in the presence of youth as candidates for elected office, in parliaments and in cabinets around the world. To fulfill this goal, we use novel data both cross-nationally and over time to investigate the representation of young adults within the candidate pool, in parliaments and cabinets across the greatest number of countries and times possible. The argument we make has relevance for settings across the world, and the empirical data we analyze is global, coupled with insights from settings where data availability, or contrasting cases, allow us to make in-depth inferences.

Voters Politicians

Age

18 years

Figure 1. The age distribution in parliaments and the age distribution among voters

To provide this holistic account of youth representation in the legislative branch, across parties’ parliamentary delegations, as candidates and in the executive, we present six chapters—one theoretical chapter and five empirical ones.

In chapter 2, we situate our study within the broader literature on youth participation and youth representation. We start by defining youth as a concept and illustrate why youth representation matters. Mainly building on Mansbridge (1999, 2005), we make a normative argument for why young adults ought to have a larger descriptive political presence. At the heart of this chapter is what we label a vicious cycle of political alienation between declining political sophistication of the young, their waning (conventional) political participation, and their insufficient representation in political office. We explain that because of societal tendencies, including changes in political socialization, a lack of civic education in school, and maturation at a later age (just to name a few factors), young citizens are less and less interested in conventional politics and participate less and less in the political process. This political apathy then renders the voice of young adults less important because parties and candidates gain relatively little from catering to the interests of a group that largely refrains from voting. This also applies to the nomination of candidates: since youth tend to abstain from voting more than the middle-aged or elderly, there is less of an incentive for parties to nominate younger candidates. Completing this vicious cycle, we illustrate that if we do not change course, we can expect young adults to become even

Introduction 5 more indifferent to the representative system as they realize that the larger political system neglects their agenda and that candidates bear little resemblance to themselves. We end the chapter by showing that one way to break this vicious cycle is to increase young individuals’ political representation. Granting the young adequate representation could allow younger cohorts to bring their topics of importance to the political agenda, which in turn could entice young adults to participate in the political process.

Chapter 3 focuses on youth representation in parliament. First, we examine the current state of age representation in more than 120 parliaments and find that young adults aged 35 years or under make up less than 10 percent of the parliamentarians at the onset of each parliament and around 20 percent of MPs aged 40 years or under. Second, we retrace youth representation in four national parliaments (Australia, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom) over several decades and report no improvement over time in the presence of youth in parliament. Third, we conduct an aggregate-level analysis on the national level, illustrating why some legislatures have younger representatives than others. As explanatory factors, we focus on national-level covariates, including institutional variables (e.g., the existence of youth quotas, the electoral system type, and candidate age requirements) and socioeconomic indicators (e.g., share of Muslims in the population, level of corruption, level of development, and the median age of the population). Our models highlight the importance of two explanatory factors: 1) lower age requirements to stand for candidacy matter, in that they make parliaments younger and increase the presence of politicians aged 35 or 40 years or under; 2) proportional representation (PR) systems trigger an increase in the share of young politicians (but PR systems do not make the parliament younger overall). We conclude this chapter with a discussion of youth quotas, highlighting the potential that such rules of affirmative action could have if applied more forcefully.

In chapter 4, we switch the analysis from the national level to the mesoor party level and study party delegations. Focusing on more than 250 parties in 52 countries, we confirm the underrepresentation of youth in parties’ groups across the restrictive sample of delegations. Graphing youth representation of the delegations from the major parties in our four respective countries, we also validate the finding that youth representation has not increased over the past decades. However, what we find is that there is more variation in the age representation of party delegations in legislatures than there is variation across parliaments. Our multivariate analyses explain this variation by mainly two factors: the age of political parties and the age of party leaders. Our results illustrate that young parties generally have younger MPs, but as these parties mature representatives get older as well. In addition, younger party leaders trigger a young(er) legislative party group. Similar to the chapter on parliaments, we end this chapter with a discussion of the potential influence of party quotas, as a fast-track mechanism to correct the imbalance in youth representation in politics vis-a-vis the adult population as a whole.

In chapter 5, we leave the parliamentary arena and focus on cabinets. Even more so than in parliaments, we find that youth in cabinets are extremely rare: young adults do not even have a third of the representation they have in parliaments. Similar to legislatures, we also find that youth representation in the cabinets we study across time has not increased over the past decades. While young adults are generally scarce in cabinets across the globe, there are notable differences between countries. Some cabinets, such as the current one in New Zealand, has about 20 percent young ministers and the average age among ministers is below 50 years. In other countries, such as India or China, the average minister is presently above 60 years and rarely is a single cabinet member below the age of 40. What explains this variation? Focusing on attributes of the nominator such as their age, as well as national level factors such as the size of the cabinet and youth representation in parliament, we find two factors to be important. First, on average, young leaders nominate younger cabinet members. Second, the number of young MPs in the national parliament appears crucial for the selection of young ministers. We conclude the chapter with an analysis of the portfolios young ministers occupy. Distinguishing between high-prestige, medium-prestige, and low-prestige portfolios, we find that the age of ministers in high-prestige portfolios is higher than the age of ministers in medium- or low-prestige portfolios, and that there are fewer young ministers on high-prestige positions.

We complement the macro- and meso-level analyses in chapters 3 to 5 with some more individual-level analyses in the two final empirical chapters of the book. In chapter 6, we use the Comparative Candidate Study (CCS) dataset, which covers 18 elections in 14 countries, to compare young candidates with young representatives. The first finding from this analysis is that there are plenty of young candidates; in fact, young candidates aged 35 years or under make up nearly 30 percent of all contenders in our sample of 18 elections. Young candidates aged 40 years or under constitute more than 40 percent of all candidates. We also highlight that most of these young

Introduction 7 candidates have high party capital: they are as strongly engaged in their parties as their more senior colleagues. However, what is missing among young candidates is electoral capital: they tend to lack the contacts and resources necessary to gain nomination for a winnable district in a majoritarian system, or an eligible list position in a proportional system. In addition, and using the example of Switzerland, we provide preliminary evidence for this gap between young candidates and young elected representatives. Parties use youth as “fillers’—that is, they place them on list positions that in practice have little chances of winning, or on special youth lists that normally do not elect anybody to the national parliament. In addition, it also seems that voters tend to vote for candidates in the older age groups.

The final empirical section of the book, chapter 7, provides insights from two settings: Sweden and Switzerland. Sweden represents a case where young adults have relatively high representation in the national parliament and where young candidates have a high chance of being elected. Switzerland represents a case where the system has not yet managed to accommodate calls for having more young adults in politics and where young candidates, despite being high in numbers, have a low chance of being elected. Having sent out a survey to both representatives and candidates in these two settings, the chapter seeks to understand how age is politicized, the extent to which survey respondents perceive age discrimination, and what factors seem to explain the contrasting outcomes in the two countries. We also wanted to know from MPs and candidates which factors they think could help increase youths’ representation. Briefly, we mainly explain Sweden’s comparatively high levels of youth representation by a somewhat youth friendly political culture. This relative youth friendliness takes the shape of implicit or explicit arrangements to represent the population as closely as possible on party lists and strong youth wings that successfully lobby for the nomination of young candidates. In contrast, while MPs and candidates in Switzerland note that youth have a low presence, there seems to be a reluctance of admitting that such patterns are an outcome of age discrimination. The survey responses from both countries further hint that both political cultures strongly value “experience” as a trait among politicians, albeit at different degrees. This strong emphasis of experience is frequently detrimental for the presence of young politicians. Several of our survey participants further highlight that belittling and derogatory attitudes toward youth are still quite widespread in the national parliaments and other political assemblies in the two countries.

Chapter 8 concludes the book. We summarize our main findings and then provide some recommendations of what political elites, individual MPs and candidates, and voters can do to make politics more inclusive for young adults. Specifically, we highlight what we see as constructive reforms that could increase the political representation of young adults. Among others, we recommend the abolishment of age barriers for young adults to stand for political office, term limits for a seat in the national assembly, and the selection of a young party leader.

CHAPTER 2

The world needs to move beyond platitudes about young people. We need meaningful opportunities for youth engagement in government systems and in the democratic process.

(ANTONIO GUTERRES, UN SECRETARY-GENERAL)

2.1. Youth: An Important Group of Study

Age is a fluid concept that has both an objective and a subjective meaning. As Hainz (2015) notes, “there is no objective threshold that separates young people from people who are not young any more” (24). Age is also somewhat of a malleable concept in the sense that being of a certain age could have a different meaning across various settings and in different times. For example, being 30 is already quite old in some settings with low life expectancy, such as Afghanistan or Zimbabwe. In other settings with life expectancies of 80 years or more, 30 years of age is still young. Individuals are also in different stages of life at the same age in different parts of the world. In Western countries such as Canada, Germany, or Switzerland many individuals are unmarried and do not have children in their early 30s. In contrast, on the African continent most women marry just after the age of 20 years and even earlier than the age of 18 in some settings, which is a pervasive pattern in countries such as Niger and Nigeria (UNICEF 2018).

In addition to being a fluid concept, age is also a temporary state in somebody’s life. Most group features are rather stable for an individual (e.g., gender identity or religious minority status seldom changes for an individual over time) and rest on well-identifiable markers (such as having a uterus—for most individuals identifying as women—or making a confession to a certain religion). However, belonging to the group of young people is different from belonging to other politically marginalized groups. Ageing is inevitable for every person and being young is thus not a permanent feature. For that reason, we could ask the question: should we be paying attention to a group with whom a majority of individuals will only have a temporary identification? Our answer is yes. Adolescents and young adults up to the age of 30 or 35 become aware of what happens around them; they develop their political values, political ambition, and political habits during these formative years (Jennings and Stoker 2004). They become children of their time with shared attributes and associations (see Munger 2021); each generation develops its own defining features, which show a clear connection with some shared views about politics and society.

But how do we define youth? Only focusing on whether or not people identify as young adults would not be very useful for us given that somebody who is 60 years of age could in theory self-identify as young.’ Instead when we use the term “youth” as a group, we try to refer to the attribute of being in a certain objective age category, rather than the self-identification as young. We believe that the number of years a person has lived should be an unproblematic way of measuring age for most people. We use this age-based approach partly because of pragmatism and partly because research on young adults in politics generally uses this approach. Also for our empirical analyses we cannot leave the definition of youth open and rely on individuals’ self-identification (see Barrett and Pachi 2019). Rather, to determine the level of youth underrepresentation, we need a clear definition including a lower and upper age limit.’