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Rule by the elderly: the absence of youth in cabinets of France, Germany and the UK

  • Data, Measures and Methods
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French Politics Aims and scope

Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. A notable exception is Grossman and François (2013) research note on the composition of cabinets in France between 1958 and 2012. The authors treat ministers’ age as one of their dependent variables, and illustrate that the average minister in the 54 year time-span was around 48 years for deputy ministers and 52 years for full ministers at the time of appointment.

  2. Electoral capital is a 5-value ordinal variable, coded 0 if the candidate has never held any electoral- or government office, 1 if the candidate has held electoral office at the local level, 2 if he/she has been a mayor, 3 if the candidate has served in the regional parliament or government, and 4 if the candidate has served in the national parliament/ government or in the European Parliament. Party capital also has 5 categories; we code the variable 0 if the candidate has never held any party office, 1 if the candidate has worked for a party as an unpaid volunteer, 2 if the candidate has worked as a paid party/ campaign worker or MP employee, 3 if he/she has held a local or regional party office and 4 if the candidate has held any national party office.

  3. See Worldometers (2019) for the calculation of the share of young adults in the voting age population.

  4. One way Anova analyses reveal that there are no statistically significant differences in the age of cabinet members, the share of young ministers aged 35 and under, as well as the share of young ministers aged 40 and under.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada

    Daniel Stockemer

  2. Governance Institute, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Aksel Sundström

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  1. Daniel Stockemer
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  2. Aksel Sundström
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Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 5 and 6.

Table 5 Typology of high-prestige, medium-prestige and low-prestige portfolios
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Table 6 Inner versus outer portfolios
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Stockemer, D., Sundström, A. Rule by the elderly: the absence of youth in cabinets of France, Germany and the UK. Fr Polit 19, 440–449 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41253-021-00158-6

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