We've Only Just Begun: Gendering Youth Wing (Party) Officeholding

• In Event: Political Parties

Abstract

Youth wings are the lifeblood of political parties: they act as a workforce for 'parent' parties throughout the election cycle, a membership maintenance mechanism as they are tasked with registering new members and growing the party organization (Bale, Webb, and Poletti 2019), as a sounding-board and space for new and revolutionary ideas for the 'parent' party to maintain relevance (de Roon 2022), and finally, as the source for political candidates (Hooghe, Stolle, and Stouthuysen 2004). Yet, not all youth wing members become successful party candidates, or elected representatives. Rather, it is often those who have garnered the social and political capital within their party who become the parties' youngest candidates. Like parent parties, youth wings too maintain organizational structures spanning various constituency levels (often a central, or national office, with sub-national units) each of which has a leadership board. These various leadership positions are what I refer to in this paper as ‘youth wing party office’ (YPO). Despite youth wings' early place in the political career pipeline and the importance of political party officeholding in representational outcomes, there is scant research on youth wing party officeholding and its role in shaping which young people become today's youngest politicians and tomorrow's longest tenured.

Significantly, gender and politics scholars have demonstrated that party officeholding and party service are both a criterion for becoming a candidate and the means through which aspirants navigate and engage in the selection and election process (Verge 2015). Furthermore, many have demonstrated that party officeholding is a gendered phenomenon whereby men and women not only have different access to party office (Verge and Claveria 2018) but party office roles, or type, are often skewed with men holding more stereotypically powerful positions (Jennings and Farah 1981) leading to negative outcomes for women's nomination, selection, and election (Bordandini and Mulè 2021; Verge and Claveria 2018). Despite this, we know very little about the earliest years of party-based political and social capital accumulation - i.e. that which is built through youth wing party officeholding - and the extent to which this form of party service might also be gendered.

In this paper, I build on gender and political party scholarship to examine two overarching questions: 1) To what extent are women represented in national and executive youth party offices? 2) What party-level characteristics explain variations in these representational outcomes? To answer these questions, I use a mixed-method approach drawing on unique interview, archival, and party-characteristic datasets gathered for 12 political party youth wings in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. First, I use an original dataset of over 6,500 Scandinavian youth party officeholders spanning various years from 2003-2013 to detail the descriptive representation of women in youth wing national and executive officeholding (dependent variables). Then, I draw on interview and extant scholarship to develop a set of hypotheses around three mechanisms that may shape gendered youth wing party officeholding: 1) party organization characteristics (size, age, (de)centralization, institutionalization), 2) party ideology, and 3) gender-related party representation rules (i.e., quotas) (Caul 1999). Finally, I use an original youth wing characteristics dataset to test the hypotheses.

Preliminary results demonstrate that youth wing party officeholding is a gendered phenomenon and the gendered political career pipeline begins earlier than previously explored in gender and politics scholarship. Like women’s inclusion and service in ‘parent’ party office, participation in youth wings and youth wing service is entrenched in gendered structures and arrangements that shape young women’s representation in youth wing party office. These findings suggest that gendered political representation begins early and can have negative outcomes for current and future women’s representation.

Author

• Brit Anlar, Rutgers University