Global Youth Representatives Age (GYRA) Dataset v1.0

The Global Youth Representatives Age (GYRA) dataset version 1.0 provides the share of total representatives in national parliaments who were under the age of 30 and under the age of 40 for various years. It covers 953 parliamentary sessions for 253 legislative chambers (both upper and lower houses) in 181 countries over the period from January 1971 to February 2023. The dataset was collected primarily (over 95%) from Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) election reports and documents. It is based on data availability so some parliamentary chambers have more observations than others. It is a historical dataset that also includes many non-Western and non-democratic countries and thereby helps to complement the IPU’s Parline database (https://data.ipu.org/) and the Worldwide Age Representation in Parliaments (WARP) dataset (www.warpdataset.com). In comparative perspective, the majority (74.3%) of GYRA’s country-year observations (n = 708) are not found in the WARP dataset (which has 921 country-year observations as of October 2024) making the two datasets complementary. The GYRA dataset also has broader coverage of non-Western countries especially in Asia and Africa, more longer-term historical coverage of non-Western countries, and it includes both lower and upper houses of parliament while the WARP dataset focuses only on lower houses. For those interested in potentially combining these datasets, the GYRA dataset indicates which of its 245 country-year observations (25.7%) are also included in the WARP dataset. However, youth representation numbers in the two datasets are not strictly comparable as GYRA reports only on <30 and <40 year olds (up to age 29 and age 39 as % of all MPs) whereas WARP reports on <31 and <41 year olds (up to age 30 and age 40 as % of all MPs).