Do more young candidacies increase youth voter turnout?

Young people today are trapped in a vicious cycle of political alienation characterized by their low interest and knowledge of politics, their declining participation in elections, and their lack of representation. How can we break this cycle? One possibility would be to increase the number of young candidates, which through symbolic representation and affinity voting, could increase youth voter turnout. We test this hypothesis using data from 47 elections in 28 countries. Through bivariate and multivariate statistics, our hypothesis is not confirmed. Instead, we find that rather than increasing youth turnout, increasing the number of young candidates has a reverse effect, and decreases youth turnout. We also find more young candidates do not lead to more young representatives. While we can only speculate about this null/ negative finding, we assume that just adding token youth candidates is not enough to increase youth voter turnout, therefore future research should focus on other potential solutions.