Beyond Apathy: Representative Performance as a Driver of the Age Gap in Voter Turnout

Unequal electoral turnout between younger and older citizens has long been a topic of debate, and the size of this age gap differs from one country to another across Europe. Such cross-national variation has not been sufficiently addressed in the literature and thus raises the question of why some countries experience more severe representational failure in electoral turnout than others. A common interpretation is that younger citizens are depicted as apathetic, and their behaviour is intended to be read as a story of the absent generation from political life. While existing literature may show lower turnout among young individuals, attributing this solely to a lack of interest or engagement, it overlooks broader structural issues that may be at play. To move beyond this behavioural blame game, we analyse the relationship between political representation and the age gap in voter turnout using time-series cross-sectional data from rounds 1–11 of the European Social Survey. This research is built on the assumption that unequal participation is due not to a lack of interest in the public good but rather to the representative performance of institutions. Representative performance generally defines a set of descriptive and substantive forms of the representation that institutions are supposed to deliver a meaningful pathway to individuals to engage with electoral politics. Alongside other recent research, this work attempts to contribute to shifting the discourse away from the deeply rooted notion of absenteeism and toward a focus on the representation of institutions.