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Abstract
This study examines the descriptive representation of younger age cohorts in Asian parliaments. Drawing from literature on women's parliamentary representation, it develops the hypothesis that proportional representation (PR) elections provide more incentives for the inclusion of younger representatives than do single-member district plurality (SMDP) electoral systems. Analysing an original dataset of over four thousand MPs from 14 countries, I find support for the argument that PR electoral systems favour the election of younger MPs even after controlling for multiple alternative explanations.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments, and gratefully acknowledges research assistance from Mohammod Irfan, Kara Kingma, Malliga Och, Erica Rosenfield and Ameena Shrestha.
Notes
The one exception is Bangladesh, where the data are from 2006.
A lone exception is Azerbaijan which is labeled as ‘unfree’ and hence excluded from half of the analysis.
Mongolia subsequently switched its electoral system in 2012 to a combination of SMDP and PR.
I would like thank an anonymous reviewer for bringing to my attention the possibility that some people may be unwilling to vote for any older MPs in post-Soviet nations due to their association or involvement with the former regime.
