(How) Does Enfranchisement Increase Representation? Voting Age Reforms and the Recruitment of Young Politicians

Do enfranchisement reforms change the demographic composition of elected bodies? While previous research has demonstrated that suffrage extensions affect policy outcomes, the underlying mechanisms remain understudied. Focusing on the case of youth enfranchisement, we hypothesize that lowering the voting age to 16 years causes changes in both voter and party behaviour and leads to more young people being elected. Drawing on survey and observational data from local elections in Norway, we use quasi-experimental evidence from two voting age trials to test these suggestions. We show that municipalities with a lowered voting age saw significantly higher shares of young councillors elected. This effect was not due to changes in party behaviour, but to voters providing young candidates with more preference votes. The effect was most pronounced in the first election following the reform, indicating that some of it might be driven by older voters changing their behaviour in a one-off manner