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People in political decision-making across the globe tend to be much older than the average voter. As such, parliaments and cabinets are unrepresentative of the larger population. This has consequences: it risks favouring policies geared towards the interests of older cohorts, it might alienate youth from voting and could push parties to appeal (even more) to older voters. In this review, we synthesize the growing literature on youth representation. We do so by: (1) delineating the group of young politicians, (2) discussing why youth ought to be present in politics, (3) empirically depicting the state of youth representation, and (4) illustrating the factors that help or harm youth to enter politics. This synthesis shows the degree to which young people are absent from decision-making bodies across the national, subnational and supra-national levels and attempts to make sense of the reasons why there is such a dearth of youth as candidates and representatives. We conclude by discussing gaps in research and suggesting several avenues for future work.

Responding to those who have read and critiqued your work, such as editors and reviewers, is a central part of academic exchange. To be able to explain and defend the choices you have made in a response letter is also a key skill that takes time to develop. It is my hope that this essay will help you reflect on the process of writing these responses and provide some useful tips toward getting published.

Public opinion surveys are a fundamental tool to measure support for women’s political rights. This article focuses on perceptions of women’s suitability for leadership. To what extent do influential cross-country surveys that include such items suffer from measurement errors stemming from gender of interviewer effects? Building on the literature on social desirability, we expect that respondents are more likely to express preference for men’s suitability as political leaders with male interviewers and more likely to state support for women’s leadership when interviewed by a woman. We hypothesize that these processes are conditioned by having one’s spouse present, by age differences between respondents and interviewers, as well as by respondents’ levels of education. Analyzing Afrobarometer data, we generally find support for our claims. In addition, it seems that men are slightly more affected by such effects than women are. These gender of interviewer effects persist when analyzing alternative survey rounds and are insensitive to various fixed effects specifications and robustness tests. For the analysis of survey data, we suggest that researchers using gender-related items should control for gender of interviewer effects. We propose that comparative survey programs pay even more attention to interviewer characteristics and the interview situation in their protocols.

Is there a gender gap in voting? Most cross-national survey research on gender inequalities in voter turnout finds that men have a higher probability to vote than women. Yet, some studies using validated turnout data shed some doubt on this finding. We revisit the question of a gender gap in voting using official records. In more detail, we compare the gender gap in turnout between survey data and official electoral figures across 73 elections. Our results highlight that in surveys, men still report higher turnout in most countries. However, official electoral figures reveal contrasting trends: across countries, women are, on average, more likely to vote. We also test two explanations for this difference in turnout between official figures and surveys: (1) men over-report voting more than women and (2) the survey samples of men and women are different. We find some, albeit very moderate, evidence for the first explanation and no support for the second explanation. All in all, our research nevertheless suggests that scholars should be careful in using surveys to detect gender differences in voting.

Public opinion surveys are a fundamental tool to measure support for women's political rights. This article focuses on perceptions of women's suitability for leadership. To what extent do influential cross-country surveys that include such items suffer from measurement errors stemming from gender of interviewer effects? Building on the literature on social desirability, we expect that respondents are more likely to express preference for men's suitability as political leaders with male interviewers and more likely to state support for women's leadership when interviewed by a woman. We hypothesize that these processes are conditioned by having one's spouse present, by age differences between respondents and interviewers, as well as by respondents' levels of education. Analyzing Afrobarometer data, we generally find support for our claims. In addition, it seems that men are slightly more affected by such effects than women are. These gender of interviewer effects persist when analyzing alternative survey rounds and are insensitive to various fixed effects specifications and robustness tests. For the analysis of survey data, we suggest that researchers using gender-related items should control for gender of interviewer effects. We propose that comparative survey programs pay even more attention to interviewer characteristics and the interview situation in their protocols.

In this research note, we focus on young adults, a group with distinct claims for political representation but a low representation in political office. Focusing on the cabinet, we analyze the marginalization of young politicians in France, Germany, and the UK using time series data. We find that adults aged 35 and below at the time of nomination have made up a mere 1% of the cabinet posts in these countries over the past 40 years. For the age group of adults aged 40 years and below, the percentage of young ministers has reached 7%. We further display that young women are even more of an anomaly than young men. More explanatory, we identify youths’ lack of electoral- and party capital as major impediments for young politicians gaining a seat in the cabinet. Finally, we investigate the type of portfolios held by the ministers in our sample and find that young ministers are much more likely than older ones to be designated to portfolios with less prestige.

Why do some political parties have a higher share of elected women? Analysing all parties in the European Parliament (EP) from 1979–2019, we test the effect of five party characteristics (their ide...

This article conceptualizes the relative absence of youth in legislatures, a feature we perceive as a democratic deficit with detrimental consequences. It introduces a new operationalization: the Youth Representation Index. Rather than calculating youths’ representation by the percentage of Members of Parliament 35 or 40 years old and younger or legislatures’ median age, we argue that scholars should assess youths’ parliamentary presence relative to their proportion of the voting-age population. We contribute by assessing the magnitude of youths’ underrepresentation across countries, finding that adults 35 years old and younger are generally underrepresented in legislatures by a factor of three and those 40 years old and younger by a factor of two. We illustrate that youths’ presence increases under proportional representation electoral systems and with candidate age requirements set at 18 years. Finally, our results illustrate that countries with a younger population display a stronger discrepancy in youth representation.

This article focuses on a specific group of legislators facing large hurdles during recruitment processes, namely young women. Building on the institutional literature, we hypothesize that gender quota regulations, youth quotas, and proportional representation (PR) electoral systems should particularly benefit young women. Our quantitative study, capturing one hundred elections conducted between 2012 and 2017, finds partial support for our expectations. For the three hypotheses, we find that legislative quotas and voluntary party quotas for both youths and gender do not significantly increase the share of young women. In contrast, PR electoral systems render the electoral arena less discriminatory toward younger women.

Research on political representation has shown that corruption is not gender-neutral: it benefits the recruitment of men to political office more than it does women. Yet, it is unclear if all men or a specific type of men, elderly men, benefits the most from corrupt networks in terms of political presence. The ‘old boys’ network thesis’ would single out older men as the most likely beneficiaries of the homosocial capital gained through informal ties in corrupt settings. In this article, we test this thesis based on a dataset comprising 98 national parliaments. Through bivariate and multivariate analyses, we find that corruption tends to benefit the presence of men regardless of their age. We further conjecture that the inclusion of young male patrons into nepotistic and clientelistic networks could further explain why these networks of ‘gendered’ corruption have been so sticky over time.

In this article, we focus on generational differences in women's representation and hypothesize that younger generations of women should be more highly represented than older generations, both in general and within the same parliament. We tested this hypothesis with data on all members who have ever served in the European Parliament since 1979. Of the four generations who have ever served in Brussels and Strasbourg – the World War II generation, the 1968 generation, the post‐1968 generation and the post‐materialist generation – we found both that women's representation increased with every generation and that their representation differs between generations within the same parliament. Finally, our results indicate that while these processes occurred roughly one generation later in eastern and southern Europe, yet, they happened faster in these parts of the European Union.

While intersectionality is a recurrent theme in the literature on women's political representation, few studies empirically disentangle who are the women who get elected to parliaments. An argument on biases in recruitment practices suggests that those who are members of more than one outgroup, such as young women, benefit from an ‘outgroup advantage’. In elections, a candidate with two outgroup features might attract more voter support than a candidate with just one outgroup feature. Hence, nominating a candidate that is both young and female could be a rational move by (male) elites in political parties that allows them to open fewer seats to newcomers. These expectations are tested on data for all members of the European Parliament since 1979. Not only is it found that women's presence increased steadily throughout the parliament's history, but also that women's representation is consistently highest among the group of young representatives, lower among middle‐aged Members of the European Parliament and lowest among older representatives.

The advent of ‘Peace Parks’ on the African continent is puzzling from the perspective of institutional theory. We focus on the world’s largest transfrontier conservation cooperation that exists to date, the Kavango–Zambezi Treaty, which was ratified by Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe in 2011. The collaboration seeks to foster sustainable governance of resources in the region. The paper asks two questions: What were the main factors facilitating the establishment of the Kavango–Zambezi Treaty? What potential challenges for the treaty remain on the operational level? Analysing interviews with key informants, we contribute by providing insights regarding the emergence and existing challenges of the treaty. Factors reducing coordination problems during the treaty’s establishment included that it did not compete with existing institutions at the international level, the important role played by moral authorities such as Nelson Mandela, and that consensus rather than conflict prevailed between respective political actors as they realized the function of this cooperation. The treaty is challenged by differences in macro-institutional factors amongst participating nations and a variation in the extent to which communities trust in and comply with these institutions. There are significant remaining obstacles with regard to harmonizing policies in the five partner countries.

In the QoG OECD CS dataset, data from and around 2017 is included. Data from 2017 is prioritized, however, if no data is available for a country for 2017, data for 2018 is included. If no data exists for 2018, data for 2016 is included, and so on up to a maximum of +/- 3 years. In the QoG OECD TS dataset, data from 1946 to 2020 is included and the unit of analysis is country-year (e.g., Sweden-1946, Sweden-1947, etc.). In the Codebook, you can find a description of all data sources and variables. We provide a list of the variables categorized into eighteen thematic topics. Detailed descriptions of all variables are sorted by original data sources. We hope that this will facilitate your search for variables.

In the QoG Standard CS dataset, data from and around 2017 is included. Data from 2017 is prioritized, however, if no data is available for a country for 2017, data for 2018 is included. If no data exists for 2018, data for 2016 is included, and so on up to a maximum of +/- 3 years. In the QoG Standard TS dataset, data from 1946 to 2020 is included and the unit of analysis is country-year (e.g., Sweden-1946, Sweden-1947, etc.). In the Codebook, you can find a description of all data sources and variables. We provide a list of the variables categorized into eighteen thematic topics. Detailed descriptions of all variables are sorted by original data sources. We hope that this will facilitate your search for variables. In 2009, the QoG Standard Dataset received the Lijphart, Przeworski, Verba Award for Best Dataset by the APSA Comparative Politics Section.

The V-Dem Dataset v11.1 covers 202 countries, with a year coverage: 1789-2020 483 V-Dem indicators, 82 indices and 5 high-level indices.

To what extent and how do men and women differ in their attitudes about poaching? Although research suggests that women can be more concerned about environmental degradation than men, inquiries about communities in protected areas are ambiguous: women are disproportionately affected by anti‐poaching laws and can have greater motivations to violate rules. We conducted a large‐scale survey in communities within the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park in Mozambique, South Africa, and Zimbabwe and explored attitudes regarding; concern about resources, rule compliance, poaching, and anti‐poaching activities. Although women's attitudes generally are not divergent from men's, we find some differences among nonelectrified households and those with a dependence on resources; these women are less likely to condemn commercial poaching and less willing to engage in anti‐poaching activities. Men in poorer households are more likely to know a poacher. We identify a need of further understanding the causes behind gender differences in conservation attitudes.

Middle-aged to senior men of the ethnic majority and higher income groups are generally overrepresented in parliaments. While research on group representation has examined issues of gender, economic standing, and, more recently, ethnicity, few studies examine age groups. We argue that the design of political institutions influences the share of young adults in parliaments across nations and hypothesize that the electoral system type, age candidacy requirements, and quotas influence the share of younger deputies in national parliaments. Analyzing an original data set with a global cross-national sample, we find that proportional representation and giving candidates the right to stand in elections as early as possible (i.e. at the age of 18) matter. In contrast, quota provisions for youths are currently too selectively applied to increase the percentage of young deputies in parliament.

The underrepresentation of youths in legislatures is a rarely studied topic in comparative research. This article examines the representation of age groups in the European Parliament, an assembly that allows researchers to observe variation in youths’ presence across institutional contexts of countries. Utilizing a register of the age of all individual Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) for the years 1979–2014, we do two things: (1) offer a picture of the representation of young politicians over time and provide some explanations for youth’s underrepresentation in the EP, and (2) investigate national differences in the representation of young MEPs. Analyzing a host of explanatory variables, our analyses highlight that lowering the legal age to run for office benefits young individuals. In contrast, our analysis suggests that countries, which are richer and have younger populations, tend to send older delegations to Brussels and Strasbourg.

An outspoken commitment in international development assistance is to promote donor coordination. Yet, how this ambition plays out in practice, or how feasible and realistic it is, has rarely been evaluated. Using the fisheries sector as a critical case, this article explores whether two major international actors, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Bank, meet the demands on policy harmonization as spelled out in the Paris Declaration on aid effectiveness. Through a systematic qualitative analysis, the article investigates if the policies of these actors are complementary or contradictory. It also discusses how the potential challenges to harmonization can be understood and what the broader implications for aid and development policies in general might be. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

The last decades’ reform of public administrations has in numerous countries included the use of performance-related pay (PRP). Such programs have been said to reduce civil servants’ incentives for bribe taking and have therefore been promoted as an anticorruption tool. However, the article proposes that such schemes’ suppressing effect on corruption incentives is questionable in highly corrupt settings because the absence of non-corrupt senior managers—and hence independent performance evaluations—may lead to the capture of such programs. An in-depth study of reforms in the South African civil service provides micro-level insights into the process in which such schemes may fail. The investigation outlines how PRP bonuses are used as rewards from corrupt senior managers to colluding subordinates. Honest bureaucrats are instead isolated and receive no addition to their salary. These selective rewards make honest behavior increasingly costly and function as an incentive for civil servants to engage in bribery.

Summary The political empowerment of women is a societal process crucial to development and progress. The V-Dem women’s political empowerment index (WPEI) provides information about women’s civil liberties, civil society participation, and political participation globally. Spanning from 1900 to 2012, three dimensions of empowerment, and over 170 countries, it is among the most comprehensive measures of women’s empowerment available. This paper presents a conceptualization of women’s political empowerment and provides an overview of the construction of the index and operationalization of its three sub-dimensions: Women’s civil liberties, civil society participation, and political participation. Compared to other indices measuring women’s empowerment, such as the GDI, the GEM, the GII, and the CIRI data on human rights, the V-Dem index allows more precise measurement and is superior in temporal scope and coverage of countries of the Global South. The paper demonstrates the benefits of this new index and its sub-dimensions through several empirical illustrations.

What determines countries’ successful transition to democracy? This article explores the impact of granting civil rights in authoritarian regimes and especially the gendered aspect of this process. It argues that both men's and women's liberal rights are essential conditions for democratisation to take place: providing both women and men rights reduces an inequality that affects half of the population, thus increasing the costs of repression and enabling the formation of women's organising – historically important to spark protests in initial phases of democratisation. This argument is tested empirically using data that cover 173 countries over the years 1900–2012 and contain more nuanced measures than commonly used. Through novel sequence analysis methods, the results suggest that in order to gain electoral democracy a country first needs to furnish civil liberties to both women and men.

There is still relatively little research on what factors explain the share of women in cabinets across countries and time. Focusing on party ideology, we advance this budding research. First, we examine if heads of government from left-leaning and/or liberal parties tend to select a larger proportion female cabinet members than those from conservative parties. Second, we evaluate whether a switch toward a left-leaning or liberal government benefits women’s cabinet presence. We test both propositions empirically with a data set covering mainly Western and industrialized countries after 1968. Our statistical analysis only find lukewarm support for the first proposition, that is, left-wing parties are no longer more likely to nominate women to cabinet posts than other party families, particularly liberal parties. Rather, what we do find is that a change in government, regardless of whether the new formateur is left-wing, liberal, or conservative, benefits the nomination of women to cabinet posts.

Few cross-country studies examine the effects of auditing quality on public sector corruption. We present a definition of good auditing consisting of three principles: independence, professionalism, and recognizing the people as the principal. Using novel data from an original expert survey covering more than 100 countries, the concept is then operationalized and tested empirically. The results demonstrate that good auditing has a positive effect on national levels of public sector corruption. This lends reason to believe that auditing which is organized according to certain principles has potential to contribute to well-functioning public administrations with a low degree of corruption.

This review synthesizes the literature studying illegality and government corruption in forest management. After discussing the theoretical connections between different types of corruption and illegal forest-related activities it describes the major trends in previous studies, examining cross-national patterns as well as local in-depth studies. Both theory and available empirical findings provide a straightforward suggestion: Bribery is indeed a "door opener" for illegal activities to take place in forest management. It then discusses the implications for conservation, focusing first on international protection schemes such as the REDD+ and second on efforts to reduce illegality and bribery in forest management. Key aspects to consider in the discussion on how to design monitoring institutions of forest regulations is how to involve actors without the incentive to engage in bribery and how to make use of new technologies that may publicize illegal behavior in distant localities. The review concludes by discussing avenues for future research.

Summary Small-scale corruption in government administrations that govern natural resources is believed to have a negative impact on conservation management. Yet, while corruption is said to obstruct the implementation of conservation policies, for instance as bribery may enable poaching in protected reserves, it is an underexplored area of research. This study investigates the effect of corruption, others’ compliance behavior, and support for regulations on rule-violating intentions. In a between-subjects experiment, a sample of resource users active in South African small-scale fisheries (N = 201) answered questions about rule-violating intentions after reading one of four scenarios, each depicting a different situation of corruption among officials that enforce regulations and compliance behavior of other resource users. The results show that resource users are more likely to state rule-violating intentions when corruption among inspectors is widespread. Moreover, the study provides further theoretical insights into the process in which corruption perceptions deter the willingness to follow rules: there is an interaction effect with support for conservation regulations, suggesting that the effect of corruption is stronger among individuals who are less supportive of such rules. These findings lend further support for the proposition that to improve the effectiveness of conservation policy, more effort is needed to reduce bribery among government officials, such as rangers and inspectors that enforce natural resource regulations.

Explanations of bureaucrats' decisions to take bribes include accounts of incentives as well as expectations. However, there are further considerations in violent contexts, where refusal of bribes may have dire consequences. Yet, insight into this topic is limited. This article investigates how violence upholds bribery, through interviews with South African officials who enforce regulations in communities where gangs operate. The investigation shows that when citizens offer bribes to enable rule violations, this is a process of both temptation and threats: officials who refuse bribes face intimidation by both citizens and colluding colleagues. This illustrates how violence may function as a mechanism to enforce corrupt contracts between bureaucrats and criminal citizens. Through reducing costs in such settings, bribe-taking is partly a strategy of social protection. This has implications for policy and suggests that, besides incentives and expectations, administrative reforms may benefit from ‘fixing the security’ of bureaucrats in violent contexts.

Whether or not there will be a "renaissance" of nuclear power in the near future may depend upon the nature of support for this energy source among citizens and elected officials. Continued examination of the predictors of opposition to nuclear power therefore remains quite policy relevant. While the existing literature finds modest but consistent gender differences in attitudes towards nuclear power in the general publics of several Western countries, the robustness of this relationship has seldom been investigated across time or among elected officials. This paper addresses both of these gaps. First, analyzing nationally representative data from the Swedish general public between 1986 and 2011, we confirm that the theoretically expected gender divide in opposition to nuclear power—whereby women report greater opposition than do men—is indeed robust over time. Second, examining data from three recent surveys of elected officials at the local, regional, and national levels in Sweden, we find that female elected officials at each polity level report greater opposition to nuclear power than their male counterparts. Our results are consistent with the health and safety concerns argument, whereby women are less supportive than are men of technologies with considerable perceived health and safety risks.

While much of the literature on voter turnout focuses on institutional and socioeconomic factors related to the ‘input’ side of the political process, we examine the ‘output’ side, and advance this field of research by studying the impact of corruption perceptions on turnout in the most recent national legislative elections across 170 European regions. Using data from a novel measure of regional perceived corruption of government services and the electoral process, together with several control variables, we find through multilevel modeling that regional quality of government positively impacts regional turnout. In more detail, our results indicate that citizens' perceptions of corruption make them, in the aggregate, less likely to cast a ballot.

In this chapter, we examine to what extent government auditing agencies mediates the effect from proportions of women in parliament on national levels of corruption; thus, we test, using a cross-country comparative design, whether higher proportions of women are associated with well-functioning auditing agencies, which further down the road is associated with lower levels of corruption. A related question is whether women in national parliaments have extra incentives to push for a state on track. One such incentive may be that those areas affecting the everyday lives of women citizens are particularly vulnerable when monitoring of the state is weak. The results suggest that initial relationships between the proportion of women in parliament and levels of corruption become insignificant when mediating variables are introduced.

Although previously sharing many ecological and institutional conditions, the fisheries reform processes undertaken in South Africa and Namibia in the early 1990s have produced highly different institutional trajectories. In Namibia, the institutional arrangements governing fisheries management have turned Namibia into a regional success case with relatively low degrees of illegal fishing and poaching, but in South Africa, the institutional arrangements are generally considered to be weak and characterized by noncompliance – and poaching is widespread. The overall objective of this article is to provide an institutional perspective on how to understand the dynamics of these different trajectories. In particular, the article concludes that the notion of path dependence, historical legacies, and distributional struggles provide important insights to the observed developments.

Mainly investigating the share of women in national parliaments, the vast cross-national literature on women’s descriptive (numerical) representation frequently overlooks women’s local representation. Yet, local councils are important political arenas. To what extent are women underrepresented there? What are the determinants of the variation of women’s local representation within and across countries? We investigate these questions through a subnational-level study, covering 272 regions in 29 European countries. Using multilevel modeling, we find that regions with high female labor force participation support for leftist rather than radical right parties and high degrees of urbanization tend to elect more women. Our results also indicate that high women’s representation levels at the national level trickle down to the local level.