Repairing Urban Youth’s Political Disengagement: Why Not Just Any Representative Will Do

This article investigates the experiences with and expectations towards politics of Brussels-based youngsters living in socio-economically disadvantaged and ethnically diverse neighbourhoods. Drawing on six focus groups, we detail how young people understand political representation—whether, how, when, and by whom they feel represented. The analysis centres on youth’s lived experiences with politics, analyses their conceptions of political representation, and unpacks the normative beliefs and expectations that underpin their accounts. Specific attention is paid to how Brussels youth articulate the relationship between descriptive and substantive representation, and whom they conceive as preferable descriptive representatives. In response to widespread feelings of misrepresentation, young people frequently put forward the figure of a “cultural broker”: a locally rooted intermediary expected to translate everyday community experiences of precarity and discrimination into political voice. Conceived as an alternative to conventional political actors—widely perceived as socially distant and insufficiently attuned to their lived realities—this figure nonetheless reproduces enduring dilemmas of representation related to selection, accountability, and legitimacy. Its appeal thus signals not participants’ rejection of representative democracy as such, but a demand for representatives who are socially proximate and experientially knowledgeable and can correct epistemic injustices.