After
They Win

Most of the conversation about young people in politics is a conversation about entry. Quotas get passed. Age limits come down. Movements push first-time candidates onto ballots, and every new cohort of winners reads as progress.

This report is about what happens next, and the picture is less encouraging.

Between January 2025 and January 2026, the Centre for Youth Policy surveyed 100 young elected and appointed officials across six world regions. They were parliamentarians, ministers, state and provincial legislators, and local councillors, all under 33, average age 27. The survey asked them, in detail, what their first years in office were actually like.

The short version: most of them are not confident they will still be in politics in five years.

A sector succeeding at youth representation would not produce numbers like these. They describe a pipeline that holds through the campaign and springs a leak once the winner is inside. The reigning model of youth political reform has been very good at building doors. What it has not built is the floor on the other side: the staff, the salary, the renomination security, and the committee seats that let a young official walk in, do the job, and stay.

What the survey shows

The survey points to five barriers that together explain the loss. Parties displace young officials after they enter. Money runs short. Institutions offer little support and almost no staff. Young officials get marginalized once inside. And exit follows, driven by burnout, harassment, and disillusionment. Each barrier gets its own chapter.

When respondents ranked these barriers against each other, the top answer was not money, party politics, or burnout. It was the lack of staff and institutional support. Sixty percent named institutional under-support as the single barrier that most affected their own career. Financial instability came last in the ranking, even though 83 percent said they could not fully cover basic living expenses on their official pay. So money is felt everywhere but rarely does the actual pushing. What does the pushing is the accumulation: trying to legislate with no staff, trying to win renomination with no party protection, trying to build authority inside institutions that have already quietly decided how much authority a young member is allowed.

Party displacement is the second clear mechanism. Thirty-nine percent of respondents struggled to secure renomination after their first term. Eighty-one percent agreed that parties use young candidates for visibility without backing them as long-term leaders. Ninety-five percent said parties should do more to keep and develop the young officials they have already elected. For the careers measured here, what a party does after the win matters more than any election result.

Marginalization is the third pattern. Seventy-seven percent agreed that young elected officials get celebrated in public and shut out of real decisions. Fifty-three percent reported limited or no real influence over decisions in their institution. For most respondents, the standard way of being received in office was symbolic.

Burnout, harassment, and exit come at the end of the chain rather than the start of it. Fifty-five percent reported burnout. Thirty-two percent had faced harassment, threats, or intimidation serious enough to affect their work. Twenty-five percent said safety concerns bore directly on whether they stayed in politics. Forty-four percent had left or seriously considered leaving for reasons that had nothing to do with losing an election. On their own, those figures look like a resilience problem. Set next to the staffing, party, and marginalization findings, they look like what you would predict from years of structural under-support.

What the report recommends

Six recommendations come straight out of the findings. The first and most important is dedicated staffing infrastructure for young elected officials. Ninety percent of respondents said access to a professional staffing setup would make them more likely to seek another term or higher office. No other reform the survey tested produced a behavioral signal that large. It is also the reform a parliament, party, or donor can act on fastest, since it needs no constitutional change and no rewrite of party rules.

The others cover transparent renomination pathways, real institutional power including substantive committee assignments, compensation and the true cost of service, treating burnout and safety as retention infrastructure rather than personal shortcomings, and a change in how the field keeps score, moving from entry rates to retention, recontestation, and advancement. All six are set out in full at the end of the report.

No two political careers start the same way, but the survey shows the entry routes fall into a handful of recognizable patterns. The route matters because it sets the resources, networks, and exposure a young official carries into office, and so sets how exposed they are to the barriers documented in the rest of this report.

Asked how they first entered politics or public life, respondents most often named the party youth wing, at an estimated 52%. Civil society and NGO work came next at 41%, then student politics at 38%. Roughly 29% came through social or protest movements, 26% through community organizing, and 22% through digital and social media activism. About one in five, 21%, came from families with a political background.

These categories overlap, and most respondents named more than one. Two things stand out. Party youth wings are the single most common formal entry channel, and civil society and movement entries are unusually well represented. This is not, for the most part, a dynastic cohort. These officials came up through the civic-engagement institutions the development sector has spent twenty years building, and by that measure the investment worked.

What nobody built alongside those institutions was a way to sustain the people once they win. The rest of this report is about the consequences.

What helped them win the first time

Asked which single factor mattered most in their first win, respondents most often pointed to party nomination and support, at 34%. Personal networks accounted for 22%, social movement support for 14%, and community reputation for 12%. Youth quotas and reserved seats, the reform mechanism the field talks about most, accounted for only 8% of first wins in this sample, with family or political connections at 6% and personal money at 4%.

Two things are worth flagging. Formal quotas produced a smaller share of these young officials than the policy literature might lead you to expect, at least here; the dominant pathway is still party-mediated. And social movements and community reputation together account for more than a quarter of first wins. That tracks with the open-response answers, where respondents kept describing a specific local cause or organizing cycle that gave them visibility before any party got involved.

How prepared they felt for the role

The jump from candidate to officeholder is abrupt. Only 12% said they felt very prepared for the responsibilities of office before entering. Another 28% felt somewhat prepared. The other 60% landed somewhere between neutral and very unprepared.

What happened after entry is worse. Asked about formal onboarding or training once in office, an estimated 41% reported none at all. Another 32% got only limited training. Just 11% reported extensive training, and the remaining 16% said they had to go find training on their own.

Those two numbers explain a lot of what follows. A freshman councillor or MP who shows up with thin preparation, no onboarding, and no policy staff learns the institution by trying things and failing where everyone can see. None of the institutions in this study had built the kind of apprenticeship that would make that first year survivable.

The clearest thing in the study is also the simplest: political systems lose young officials after they get in, not before.

Asked whether they planned to seek another term or higher office, 42 percent said yes and 22 percent had already done it. That leaves 36 percent who either did not plan to continue or were unsure, a serious retention risk on its own. Stretch the horizon and it gets worse: asked how likely they were to still be active in formal politics in five years, 56 percent said unsure or unlikely.

The most direct measure of the crisis is the 71 percent who agreed with one statement: it is easier for young people to win office than to remain in politics. A separate question, phrased differently, asked whether systems recruit young candidates better than they sustain young leaders, and it came back at the same 71 percent. Two questions in different parts of the survey landed on the same number. That kind of convergence is uncommon, and it suggests the perception is not an artifact of wording but a steady judgment respondents make about their own systems.

The 36 percent who are unsure or done deserve a closer look, because they are not who you might assume. The interview material suggests this group is not made up of people who wandered into politics half-committed. It includes respondents who built campaigns over years, won decisively, and described themselves at entry as being in it for the long haul. Their doubt is not a newcomer's doubt. It is the doubt of someone who got inside the institution and found it was not set up to keep them.

The shape of the loss

Read the field in light of this and a lot of the existing infrastructure looks strangely aimed. Programs, conferences, training pipelines, and donor strategies have built real momentum around getting young people elected. Far less attention goes to the years they actually hold office. A young official who wins, struggles, and quietly leaves after one term does not generate the coverage a first-time victory does. Their absence in year five generates none at all.

That leaves a measurement problem sitting on top of the substantive one. The headline statistics on youth political participation track entry. The Inter-Parliamentary Union counts young MPs each year. Election commissions report the share of candidates under thirty. Donor reports lead with first-time wins. None of these widely cited measures ask whether the same officials are still in office two terms later, whether they were renominated, or whether they moved up. The whole apparatus is built to notice doors opening and stays quiet about what happens once they close.

The cost of the leak

Every young official who leaves after one term takes something with them. The institutional knowledge about how committees work, how budget cycles move, how a constituency thinks, walks out the door. The mentorship they might have given the next cohort never happens. The pipeline that should be producing senior leadership fifteen years out loses the reps it needs in years three through seven. Systems that reliably lose their youngest officials tend, a decade later, to struggle to produce mid-career political leadership.

Parties still control who gets to run: nomination, ticket allocation, list placement, faction backing, renomination. The survey shows party support behaving very differently before and after a young candidate wins.

Twenty-seven percent of respondents said party support dropped or disappeared once they were in office. Thirty-nine percent hit difficulty securing renomination, reselection, or party backing for a future race. Forty percent had experienced or watched the party displace young elected officials. Fifty-five percent said it was very or somewhat common in their system for a young official to be swapped out after one term for someone older or better connected.

The sharpest party findings are not about support being formally withdrawn. They are about what young officials came to understand the party wanted from them in the first place. Eighty-one percent agreed that parties use young candidates for visibility without backing them for long-term leadership. Ninety-five percent agreed their youth identity counted for more during the campaign than during their time in office. Almost nobody in this sample found that being young kept its value once they were inside the building.

That 95 percent is one of the most concentrated agreement patterns in the whole survey, holding across regions, party families, and levels of office. The mechanism behind it is not subtle. During a campaign, a young candidate is a recruitment device. They show up in outreach aimed at younger voters, get quoted in coverage about generational change, stand next to senior figures in the unity photo that signals renewal. Once they win, the leadership that elevated them often files them away as one more freshman with no special claim on senior attention.

The mechanisms of displacement

Respondents who struggled with renomination named a familiar set of reasons. The party wanted someone older or more senior. A regional leader had promised the seat to a patronage ally. The young official was seen as too independent, or had voted against leadership on a sensitive bill. They could not fund their own renomination fight. They had no faction sponsor. The internal process that decided renomination was opaque and offered no appeal. Notice what is missing from that list: voters. Every one of these plays out where only insiders can see it.

The pattern is gendered. Women in the sample were more likely to report renomination trouble, more likely to describe being replaced by an older man, and more likely to name factional politics as the cause. Age and gender combine into a specific vulnerability. A young woman who wins once can be held up as proof the party is modernizing, and then have her seat routed to a senior man the next cycle on the argument that a competitive race needs a more experienced candidate.

When losing the seat is not losing the election

This matters for how youth political success gets measured. A young politician denied renomination has not lost in any electoral sense. Voters never got the choice. Yet in the standard statistics on youth participation, that person vanishes the same way a defeated incumbent does. The way they were lost is invisible in the data.

That invisibility has real consequences for advocacy. Civil society and donor strategies that succeed at producing first-time wins may do very little for retention if the party machinery after the election stays opaque. A first-term win looks like progress. The renomination cycle two or four years later can quietly undo it, and without any measurement of renomination outcomes, the field has no way to catch that reversal while it is happening.

The financial findings are stark. Eighty-three percent of respondents said their official compensation did not fully cover their basic living expenses. Eighty-five percent said financial pressure affected their ability to serve effectively, either a great deal or somewhat.

Fifty-four percent had seriously or occasionally thought about leaving politics for a more financially stable career, or had already gone. These numbers describe a working condition, not a preference. Young officials are paying out of pocket to do the job and borrowing from family to cover the gap between the salary and the need.

The pressure also has a timing problem the headline figures miss. The years of worst financial exposure are usually the first two, before a young official has built up the savings, network, or reputation that lets them subsidize the role from outside income. Those are also the years when the institution is deciding their future: committee assignments, leadership tracks, early signals about renomination. The money is tightest exactly when showing up and staying engaged matters most.

The hidden costs of office

Salary is the visible part of the picture and not the most punishing part. Respondents kept pointing instead to the costs official compensation does not touch. Travel between the constituency and the capital, especially for legislators representing far-flung districts. Constituency office expenses: staff salaries, rent, supplies. The expectation, common in many political cultures, that an elected official will personally chip in for community events, weddings, funerals, and emergencies, often at real cost. And fundraising for the next race, which starts almost the moment the last one ends.

None of that shows up on the salary line, and all of it comes out of the same pay that already fails to cover basic expenses for 83 percent of respondents. The gap gets filled with family money, outside income, a partner's support, drawn-down savings, and debt. The result is a slow financial erosion that builds across a term and feeds directly into the decision about whether to run again.

A force multiplier, not a single cause

Forty-four percent agreed that only young people with family wealth, patronage networks, or outside income can afford to stay in politics. Given how absolute that statement is, 44 percent is better read as a floor than a ceiling. Close to half the sample sees politics as tilted toward those who can bankroll their own careers. What that describes is a class filter that kicks in after the election rather than before it. Anyone can win. Staying is the part that gets means-tested.

There is an important wrinkle in how respondents ranked all this, though. Asked to compare the five barriers, financial and career instability came fifth. Money is a widespread daily burden of service, but respondents saw institutional under-support, party displacement, and lack of power as more decisive in whether they would stay. That does not mean money is irrelevant. It means money works through the other barriers. A young official with real staff and secure renomination can absorb financial strain that would otherwise be unbearable. The same strain turns decisive for someone also fighting under-support and an uncertain political future.

This is the central finding of the report.

Three questions converge on it. Asked to rank the five barriers, respondents put lack of staff and institutional support first. Asked which single barrier most affected their own career, 60 percent named institutional under-support. Asked whether access to a professional staffing setup would make them more likely to seek another term or higher office, 90 percent said yes, the strongest reform-related signal anywhere in the survey.

The texture is worth getting into. Seventy-four percent reported inadequate staffing or significant staffing concerns. Eighty percent said the lack of staff limited their effectiveness in office. Sixty-five percent said it directly affected whether they would continue. Seventy percent agreed that young officials are expected to perform like senior politicians without the staff, networks, or infrastructure the senior ones have.

This is not an administrative inconvenience. It is a mismatch between what the job requires and what young officials are handed to do it with. A new MP with no research staffer is expected to evaluate budget legislation by reading the bill alone at night. A new councillor with no communications support is expected to defend their record on social media in real time, by themselves, while running a constituency office on volunteer help.

What staff they actually had

Reverse the question and the gap comes into focus. Asked what professional staff they had access to in office, an estimated 23% reported full-time staff, 31% had part-time staff, and 14% shared staff with other officials. The rest, roughly 32%, had no paid staff at all or relied entirely on volunteers.

Where staff did exist, who paid for them tells its own story. The institution or government office covered staffing for an estimated 38% of respondents who had any staff. Parties provided staff for about 21%. The rest came out of personal funds (15%), donor or fellowship programs (14%), and volunteers (12%). Much of the work a fully resourced institution would fund itself is instead propped up by personal money and short-term donor support.

The functional breakdown is just as uneven. The most commonly available support, at an estimated 48%, was scheduling and logistics. Communications reached 38%, constituent services 35%. Legislative and research support, the function most tied to actually governing well, was available to only 28%. Mentorship reached about 22%, legal or procedural guidance about 19%.

Line that up against the Q45 figures in the chart above and the pattern holds. The functions young officials need most, research and policy capacity above all, are the ones institutions are least likely to provide. The functions institutions do provide are the ones easiest to staff and least likely to translate into legislative effectiveness.

Informal infrastructure as evidence of institutional failure

The most telling adaptation to the staffing gap is what respondents built to replace it. WhatsApp groups running as policy teams. Friends serving as unpaid press secretaries. Ad hoc cross-border peer networks doing the job of a research office.

Networks like that show real resourcefulness. They are also a symptom. A 28-year-old legislator should not have to crowdsource bill analysis from peers in other countries because nobody in their own parliament was assigned to brief them.

What the reform could look like

The reform these findings point to is unusually concrete, and unusually cheap by the standards of political change. No cultural shift required, no constitutional amendment, no decade-long campaign. The ask is staff. The mechanisms already exist for senior officials in mature systems; the task is to extend something comparable to young first-term officials, who tend to be the most under-resourced legislators in the building at exactly the moment they most need support.

A working version already exists in pieces around the world. Westminster-tradition parliaments give backbenchers some research support through library and committee staff. Some legislatures fund individual member offices with small staff budgets. Civil society groups occasionally embed policy fellows in the offices of priority legislators. In no single system do these pieces add up to the comprehensive staffing that would answer the 90 percent finding.

A scalable design would combine three things. First, a guaranteed minimum staff allocation for first-term young officials, funded through the legislative budget rather than the party so that staffing does not become one more lever of party discipline. Second, a fellowship program that places trained policy and communications staff into first-term offices on two-year embedded placements, drawing on civil society, academia, and donors to build the pipeline. Third, shared support functions such as legal and procedural advisers, communications training, and constituent-services capacity that young officials can draw on without funding the full headcount alone.

None of this is exotic, and none of it requires reinventing the institution. The cost is modest next to the campaign and recruitment infrastructure that produced these officials in the first place. The 90 percent finding tells us the recipients already know what would change their decision to stay. Nobody needs to be persuaded. The response just needs to be resourced.

A theme runs through the whole survey: the title and the power come apart.

Fifty-three percent felt they had limited, very little, or no real influence over decisions in office. Seventy-seven percent agreed that young elected officials get celebrated publicly and excluded from real decision-making. Seventy-five percent had felt tokenized because of their age. Seventy percent said their ideas were dismissed on account of age or assumed inexperience.

Symbolic inclusion works like this. A young official gets the title, the seat, the photo in the party material, the speaking slot at the youth conference. What they do not get is the committee that controls a budget, the portfolio that touches infrastructure, or the leadership role that signals they are being groomed for higher office. Sixty percent said this kind of marginalization had eaten into their motivation to keep going.

The portfolio pattern

The survey did not formally measure committee assignments, but the open-response and interview material is consistent enough to name the pattern. Young officials get routed disproportionately toward youth, gender, sport, culture, technology, and digital affairs. They are disproportionately absent from finance, foreign affairs, defense, infrastructure, and energy. The first set of portfolios is real work, and the respondents who held them did not dismiss it. But the second set is where the legislative records, constituency relationships, and donor networks that build long careers actually come from.

Steering young officials toward the first set and away from the second is not always a deliberate decision. It gets framed as recognition, or as a match for their interests, or as a fit with their public profile. The effect is the same regardless of intent. By the time renomination comes around, the young official has a record built on the less consequential portfolios, and they get judged, often by the same leadership that made the assignments, on a record those assignments held down.

A mechanism, not a feeling

There is a hard dynamic buried in these findings. The same system that prizes youth during a campaign discounts it just as fast during governance. Respondents were asked to embody generational change in public while being locked out of the processes through which generational change would actually occur. A young legislator can spend a four-year term being hailed as the future of the party and never sit on a committee that touches real authority. Come renomination, they have a thin record of substantive influence to run on, and the same leadership that thinned it cites that record as the reason to back someone else.

That is what makes marginalization a structural problem rather than a matter of hurt feelings. The institution manufactures the weakness and then treats it as if it were natural. The young official denied the committee, the portfolio, or the leadership track never develops the record that would make their continuation obvious. The institution then reads that missing record as proof they were never ready in the first place.

Fifty-five percent of respondents reported burnout, from mild to severe. Thirty-two percent had faced harassment, intimidation, or threats, online, offline, or both. Twenty-five percent said safety concerns had directly affected their willingness to stay in politics. Forty-four percent had left, seriously considered leaving, or occasionally considered leaving.

These figures are worth sitting with, because the reflex in advocacy is to read them as young leaders being exhausted, traumatized, or short on grit. The interview material says something else. The respondents weighing exit were, in most cases, doing a calculation. They set thin staff support, financial strain, party fragility, marginalization, and personal risk against the option of leaving, and for many of them leaving penciled out. That is a conclusion, not a collapse.

The texture of burnout

The burnout described here has a specific character. It is not mainly the burnout of overwork, though the workload is heavy. It is the burnout of grinding away inside an institution while slowly becoming certain the institution is not built to let the work land. Respondents described drafting amendments that were never tabled, building constituency programs that got defunded after a year, mediating between communities at personal cost only to watch leadership ignore the result, and spending months on a policy file that got handed to a senior member the moment it turned politically valuable.

Call it structural burnout rather than personal burnout. Self-care, peer support, and time management touch it only at the edges. The respondents who described the worst burnout were not the ones logging the most hours. They were the ones whose work was most consistently cut off from any outcome they could see.

What drives the burnout

The 55 percent figure gets more useful once you break it into causes. Asked what contributed most to their burnout or disillusionment, respondents who reported burnout most often named overwork, at an estimated 68%. The slow pace of change came second at 61%. Lack of staff was a direct cause for an estimated 58%, and lack of real power for 54%. Financial stress came in at 49%, party conflict at 42%, and online harassment at 35%.

The mix is itself a finding. The top three drivers are not personal failings or abstractly unmanageable workloads. They are doing too much, being unable to make a difference, and being asked to do the work without a team. All three run straight back to the structural conditions documented earlier. These officials are not burning out because politics is hard in general. They are burning out because politics is structured to be hard for them in ways their senior colleagues are shielded from.

Harassment and the gendered cost of office

The 32 percent harassment figure flattens a problem that is very unevenly distributed. Broken out by type, an estimated 23% of all respondents reported online harassment only, 5% offline or in-person only, and 4% both. Online is the dominant channel for this generation.

The gender split is more revealing. Among women in the sample, an estimated 48% reported some form of harassment, intimidation, or threats, against 19% of men. Online harassment in particular was reported by a large majority of women, including organized cross-platform campaigns, sustained gendered abuse, and the specific category of intimate harassment aimed at young women in public roles. The 32 percent average hides the fact that for women, harassment is closer to a standing condition of the job than an exception to it.

The 25 percent safety figure, the share whose safety concerns directly affected their willingness to continue, is concentrated the same way. The respondents describing threats in the open responses were disproportionately women, disproportionately from systems with weak rule of law, and disproportionately working on land, gender, religion, or organized economic interests. For some subsets of young officials the cost of staying is not abstract. It reaches their families.

None of the systems in the sample had a response respondents called adequate. Where harassment response exists at all, it tends to be reactive rather than preventive, routed through party structures that may be part of the problem, and dependent on whether police or prosecutors take threats against young politicians seriously, which respondents said was inconsistent at best.

An unevenly distributed risk

Add it up and exit is not evenly spread. The officials most likely to leave sit at the intersection of several vulnerabilities at once. Women working on contested issues. Officials in systems with weak protective infrastructure. Officials without family wealth to cushion the financial strain. Officials whose party standing is shaky. Each factor compounds the others. Someone facing only one can usually push through. Someone facing three or four is making the exit calculation on terms the institution has already stacked against staying.

The reframing this asks for is significant. The field has tended to treat burnout, harassment, and exit as wellbeing issues, handled with individual support, mental health resources, and resilience training. Those supports matter. But framed as wellbeing alone, they quietly locate the problem in the young official rather than in the conditions. This survey points the other way. Young officials are responding rationally to conditions never built to sustain them, and reform has to reach the conditions, not just the response.

The Q78 ranking is one of the most useful moments in the survey, because it makes respondents compare the barriers head to head. The order they produced is not the one most outside observers would guess. Coverage of young politicians usually leads with money or with burnout. Respondents put institutional under-support and party gatekeeping at the top and financial strain at the bottom.

Ranking from Q78. Personal impact: percentage identifying each as the single barrier that most affected their own career (Q79).

None of this says money does not matter. It says money is the universal pressure behind everything, while the specific factors that decide whether a first win becomes a lasting career are institutional: whether you have staff, whether the party will renominate you, whether you are handed real responsibilities.

The order also clarifies how the categories relate. Burnout, harassment, and exit, the most visible parts of the problem in public coverage, sit at rank four. They are downstream. The people who burn out and leave are the ones for whom the conditions at ranks one through three have already aligned to make staying untenable. So reform aimed only at the visible exit phenomena, mental health support, harassment response, peer networks, will not shift the trajectory unless the institutional conditions higher up get addressed too.

Asked which single reform would most improve retention, respondents clustered on institutional measures: guaranteed staffing, mentorship and training, leadership roles for young officials, and stronger party commitments to renomination. That the ranking and the reform preferences line up is a finding on its own. Respondents are internally consistent. They name institutional under-support as the leading barrier, name staffing as the reform most likely to change their decision to stay, and put financial pressure last while still calling it a daily burden. The recommendations follow that order.

The political imagination of the past decade has been organized around one question: how do we get young people into office. The survey behind this report suggests the question for the next decade is a different one. It is what happens once they are in.

The 71 percent finding running through this study is not a verdict on young people. It describes institutions that learned how to recruit a new generation without learning how to keep it. The fixes are not exotic. Staff. Renomination security. Real committee assignments. A salary that covers rent. Protection against threats. Paths to leadership that do not require waiting for the previous generation to clear out.

What is missing is not the policy menu. It is the recognition that the work does not end the moment a young person wins. In a lot of cases, that is the moment it starts.

Recruitment and fieldwork

The 100 respondents were recruited through direct outreach, institutional partnerships, youth political networks, and leadership convenings, with selective snowball sampling to extend reach into different political systems. Fieldwork ran for twelve months between January 2025 and January 2026. The instrument was administered online in English, with optional follow-up conversations conducted virtually.

Several follow-up interviews were translated from local languages and have been lightly edited for clarity and anonymity. Quotes throughout this report are attributed only by role, age, and broad region, in line with consent protocols.

Office level and demographics

Thirty-five percent served as national parliamentarians, 12 percent in national executive positions, 25 percent at the state or regional level, and 28 percent at the local level. Women made up 44 percent of the sample. The average age was 27, with respondents ranging from 18 to 32.

Ethics and consent

All respondents provided informed consent. Direct quotes are anonymized by role, age, and broad sub-region. Identifying details have been removed from within quotations. For respondents working in higher-risk political contexts, additional anonymization measures were applied. The Centre for Youth Policy obtained explicit re-consent before publication for all named direct quotations in this report.

Limitations and caveats

The sample of 100 respondents is geographically and substantively diverse but is not statistically representative of all young elected or appointed officials globally. Recruitment relied on direct outreach, institutional partnerships, youth political networks, and selective snowball sampling, which introduces self-selection bias.

The instrument was administered in English, which likely favored internationally connected and English-speaking respondents and underrepresents young officials in non-English political systems.

Several follow-up interviews were translated, lightly reconstructed for clarity, and anonymized. Findings should be read as comparative and directional. The Centre for Youth Policy welcomes replication of this work in additional languages and political systems and considers expanded multi-language survey rounds a priority for the next phase of research.

The 100 respondents represent seventy-three countries across six world regions. Where multiple respondents share a country, role, age, and sub-region, additional anonymization measures were applied before publication.

Asia · 30 respondents

South Asia 12 · Southeast Asia 10 · East Asia 5 · Central Asia 3.

Europe · 26 respondents

Western Europe 14 · Eastern Europe 12.

Africa · 18 respondents

West Africa 8 · East Africa 6 · Southern Africa 3 · Central Africa 1.

Latin America · 13 respondents

Spanning South America, Central America, and the Caribbean.

Middle East and North Africa · 8 respondents

Spanning the Maghreb, the Levant, and the Mashreq.

North America · 5 respondents

United States and Canada.

Cross-cuts

The country distribution above is reproduced from the respondent log used for fieldwork between January 2025 and January 2026. The same 100 respondents are also distributed across office levels and demographics as follows.