The Representation of Younger Age Cohorts in Asian Parliaments: Do Electoral Systems Make a Difference?

The Uneven Representation of Women in Asian Parliaments: Explaining Variation across the Region*

“…The type or number of left parties may also matter (Norris, 2004,199). For example, in Nordic countries like Sweden with multiple left-of-center parties many parliament members are women (Joshi and Navlakha, 2010;Joshi, 2013b). Studies find 'green' parties to be more interested in women's advancement than 'old left' parties (Kittilson, 2006).…”

“…Beginning with a brief review of the literature on women's representation in parliament, we develop several hypotheses of how culture, socio-economic modernization, and political institutions may impact women's 'descriptive' representation in Asia. Utilizing a new dataset of over 4,000 Asian members of parliament (MPs) (Joshi, 2012a;joshi, 2013a), we analyze 34 contemporary Asian parliaments to test these hypotheses, especially the impacts of party and electoral systems.…”

Growing Old Without Grace: Electoral Authoritarianism and the Age Composition of Russia's Regional Legislative Assemblies

“…All these arguments, without any significant substantive modifications, can be applied to the representation of young people. While the body of empirical research on this subject is much smaller than in the case of women's representation, the available studies consistently show a strong association between this variety of electoral rules, on the one hand, and the legislative turnover (Matland and Studlar 2004) and young people's representation (Joshi 2013;Norris and Krook 2009), on the other hand.…”

“…The principal empirical indicator used in this study is the average age of the regional deputies at the time of election. From the methodological point of view, this choice represents a major departure from the previous studies in which the dependent variables were normally constructed as percentage shares of non-elected incumbents (Matland and Studlar 2004) or young deputies (Joshi 2013;Norris and Krook 2009). While the merits of these approaches are undeniable, this study seeks to combine their substantive foci by using an empirical indicator directly pertaining to the concept of generational turnover, which is best reflected in the average age of legislators.…”

Youth Representation within the World’s Parliaments

“…As we can see in the table below, the 20s age range manages to exceed only the 80s and 90s age ranges, the majority of the members of the parliaments being distributed between two age ranges: the 40s and the 50s. Young people are considered to be an excluded majority (Joshi, 2014), their policy interests being overlooked. Including a higher number of young people in the structure of the parliaments could determine the increase in civic participation and active citizenship, by demonstrating that politics is open for the youth segment as well as it is open for the other segments (Bouza, 2014).…”