Do Politicians Listen to Youth Wings? Evidence from an Elite Experiment

Original

Do Politicians Listen to Youth Wings? Evidence from an Elite Experiment

Henrik Bech Seeberg

Abstract

Most political parties have youth wings. They are major recruitment and campaign vehicles for parties, but do politicians listen to them when it comes to policy positions? Short of research, I provide a first answer to this question via a large-scale survey experiment of politicians across a range of issues. I show that politicians listen to their youth wings not because of who the youth wings are but because of what they say. The politicians do not adjust because the argument comes from the youth wing but because the youth wing takes a more ideologically pure and, therefore, radical stance than the mother party or refer to their expertise on the issue. These results apply particularly to politicians who applaud the youth wings’ policies in general and politicians who are electorally vulnerable. This has important implications for research on political representation and our understanding of preference aggregation in political parties.