Nästa generation utan representation : En fallstudie av ungas representation i Sundsvalls Kommun

Sammanfattning: IntroductionRepresentation in politics has been a major debate in political science with various groups being underrepresented in the decision-making assembles, one of these groups has been the youth which is strongly underrepresented. This essay aims to examine youth representation at a municipal level. Few studies have conducted about youth representation but there is widespread study about representation. The already elected politicians are in many ways key factor in order for the youth to even be able get their representation since they possess the power to let them inside the political room. It will be this gap inside political science that is going to be investigated in this essay. MethodThis essay methodology is qualitative case study of Sundsvall municipality's politicians approach to youth representation. Four politicians with different backgrounds and party belong have been interviewed and afterwards have a thematic analysis been conducted from their answers. With made it possible to find patterns and connections that are related to research within representation and youth. ResultsThe essay concluded that youth representation is much based on the parties and their structured way how to influence society and henceforth complexed to be represented in any other way. Everything that the politicians acts on is what the political parties want with mean the can never express their own agenda and feel like they represent the party voters and ideology more than Sundsvall city. The parties hold a lot of power because aside the mandate in the municipal council they appoint all the positions in various committees and municipal companies that the votes never choose between. Which means that the youth relies on parties including them to grant them these positions. The biggest issue with this is that studies have shown that youth are going away from becoming member of political parties which here becomes issue with young representation with this essay concur. Based on the Hanna Fenichel Pitkin approach to representation the politicians express that they think substantive representation are most important then descriptive representation but with deeper analysis shows more than both are combined rather than separate. The few elected youth can in many ways through symbolic representation developed becoming a symbol for youth represented as a group. The essay found that young politicians argued that they do not consider descriptive as most important but that they themselves had received votes because there are youths and experienced duty to manage youth opinion, which here may drew the conclusion about when a group are underrepresented the descriptive representation became more important and puts more pressure on those who is to belong to their group to represent that particular group. Youth representation in Sundsvall was able to examine by the LUPP resulted there the youth express that I high and much high level want to influence the municipality policy, but few believe that they can actually do it. The politics said that this is an issue but note that they want to know if this only applies to youth or everybody. All politician was, to some extent self-critical and meant that they themselves needed to get better at including youth and not having them on the sideline.