ConstiRep

This collaborative project ambitions to shed light on parliaments’ representative (or linkage) function connecting citizens, and in particular young people, to authoritative decision-making.  The representation of young people in parliaments has long interested political scientists because it constitutes an essential component of a fully-fledged democratic system. While much of existing scholarly work focuses on the underrepresentation of young people among MPs and elected officials, there is still a lot to be learned about their substantive representation. This project aims at contributing to this debate by focusing on the extent, how and why parties in parliament use a classical tool such as parliamentary questions to explicitly cater to their younger constituencies. To do so, it applies a most different systems design and selects countries with the most diverse electoral rules, as the latter have been shown to strongly affect the link between legislators and their constituencies. The empirical analysis thus relies on a systematic comparison of parliamentary questions in France and in Italy.