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Youth is a recurrent topic of public debates, particularly because youth features in almost all issue fields discussed in mass media, ranging from educational and cultural to criminal matters. However, previous research has highlighted that youth is not necessarily actively involved in raising its own voice within the public sphere, which gives cause for concerns about the representation of youth in public discourses and thus in democratic opinion formation. This article wishes to critically assess the proposition that young people are objects of public discourses rather than active participants. For this purpose, it will analyze public statements reported in newspapers of nine countries (Germany, France, Greece, Italy, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom). The analysis makes conceptual use of claims-making analysis and tries to identify contextual factors that determine the extent to which youth actors actively participate in public discourses. In particular, we wish to assess whether discursive inclusion or exclusion of youth is patterned along countries and/or policy fields. Our findings show that policy fields are the most important contextual factors. Moreover, considering claims and actors, public debates about youth are rather similar between the nine countries. This indicates that public debates about youth are patterned by a similar, cross-national differentiation along policy domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]