How political parties’ youth wings are organised: comparative evidence from 57 statutes in 11 countries

Political organisation allows political mobilisation and influence, as much research on political parties vividly documents. This article extends this important body of research and introduces a first large-scale comparative dataset on the organisation of political parties’ youth wings in multiple countries. The dataset is based on extensive coding of youth wing statutes. Youth organisations are categorised on their internal democracy, their autonomy from the senior party, and their access to the senior party. The findings suggest that youth wings are highly organised and largely organised independently of their senior parties. Most of them have high levels of internal democracy and autonomy from the senior party but low access to the senior party. The organisations vary considerably and tend to resemble each other more geographically than ideologically. This new dataset allows an acceleration in the study of political parties’ youth wings as engines of youth mobilisation and representation.