Engaging the Next Generation: Exploring State Parties and Youth Participation

• In Event: Committee on Political Sociology: Political Participation

Abstract

It is well known that even as Congress continues to grow more diverse, it remains unrepresentative of the U.S. population. One way in which Congress is unrepresentative of the larger population is in respect to age. The House of Representative for the 116th Congress is composed of 53.9% Baby Boomers (born 1946 to 1964), 31.5% Generation X (born 1965-1979), and 6% Millennials (born 1980-1996) (Desilver 2017). However, Baby Boomers made up only 25% of the 2017 U.S. labor force compared to 33% Generation X, and 35% Millennials (Fry 2018). Overall only some of this discrepancy can be explained by the constitutional requirement that members of the House of Representatives be at least 25 years of age because as of the state of the 116th Congress in 2019, most Millennials were eligible to serve in the House. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the membership requirements of the state-level Democratic and Republican parties contribute to this lack of representation.

The bylaws of each state political party dictate each party’s formal membership. As a result, there is considerable variation in the size and diversity of state parties across the country. One source of variation is whether or not each party allows for formal representation of the state’s College Democrats/Republicans and/or the state’s Young Democrats/Republicans. In this paper I investigate the implications of this variation. First, I predict that political parties with higher levels of youth representation will have younger candidates for Congress compared to political parties who limit youth representation within the formal party organization. Second, I expect that political parties with higher levels of youth representation will see higher levels of youth political participation more generally compared to political parties who limit youth representation within the formal party organization. To test these hypotheses, I create a new dataset of state-level party rules by collecting and coding provisions within the bylaws of all 100 state-level Republican and Democratic parties. I operationalize youth representation within each party by counting the proportion of formal party members associated with either the state’s College Democrats/Republicans, the state’s Young Democrats/Republicans or otherwise identified as youth members by the party’s bylaws.

Overall, this paper will add to the discipline’s knowledge of youth representation by examining whether membership within formal party organizations leads to greater youth representation in other governmental institutions. Furthermore, it speaks to youth political participation more generally by evaluating whether increased descriptive representation in political parties motivated younger voters to become more involved in the political process.






Sources:

DeSilver, Drew. “Millennials, Gen X Increase Their Ranks in the House, Especially among Democrats.” Pew Research Center. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/11/21/millennials-gen-x-increase-their-ranks-in-the-house-especially-among-democrats/ (January 10, 2019).

Fry, Richard. “Millennials Are Largest Generation in the U.S. Labor Force.” Pew Research Center. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/04/11/millennials-largest-generation-us-labor-force/ (January 10, 2019).

Author

• Matthew James Geras, University of Oklahoma