Unravelling the adoption of youth quotas in African hybrid regimes: evidence from Morocco

Abstract

Parliamentary youth quotas have been adopted by nine countries, mainly African autocracies. They have also attracted the attention of international organisations, which consider them indicators of democratic progress. Why were these quotas adopted? This article challenges the long-standing regime survival thesis by explaining quota adoption as the result of the convergent strategies of actors placed inside and outside the regime. It also provides new theoretical arguments that point to the transformation of representative linkages in hybrid regimes and shows how this is justified in the light of empirical evidence grounded on qualitative methodology and extensive fieldwork. By connecting the broader historical and socio-political context where youth quotas emerged – Africa – to the micro-level processes of quota adoption – based on the Moroccan case – this article provides a dynamic picture of how political representation is claimed and mobilised in contemporary Africa while shedding some light on the inclusive limits of quota policies.

Introducing the Worldwide Age Representation in Parliaments (WARP) data set

“…Compared to the study of other outgroups in politics, research on youth representation in parliament and other elected bodies is still in its infancy but growing. Among others, studies have started to tackle youth representation in certain regions and countries, including South Asia (Joshi 2015), Morocco (Belschner 2021; de Paredes and Desrues 2021), Tunisia (Belschner 2021; Dobbs 2020), Ghana (Gyampo, 2015), the United States (Curry and Haydon 2018), and in the European Parliament (Stockemer and Sundström 2018a, 2019). In addition, there is budding research looking at youth representation from a global lens (e.g., Stockemer and Sundström, 2018b; IPU 2018, 2021), as well as studies that tackle the question of intersectionality (i.e., whether young women face even stronger underrepresentation in parliaments than young men do; Belschner and Garcia de Paredes 2021).…”

Can low-cost, scalable, online interventions increase youth informed political participation in electoral authoritarian contexts?

“…The reasons underlying such relatively low youth electoral turnout are a source of ongoing debates (4). It is possible that some youth want to engage in politics through voting but face high barriers to participating in the electoral process (5). In this case, lowering participation barriers should result in greater youth turnout.…”