Lower electoral participation among young people has frequently been identified as one of the main challenges facing contemporary democracies. In Portugal, this debate has gained particular relevance with recent studies on youth abstention and electoral behaviour, namely the article “Too young to party, ready to say enough? Youth turnout and the rise of Chega in Portugal” (Costa et al., 2025), which highlights consistent patterns of lower participation among young people. Starting from a limitation identified by the authors, concerning the dichotomous categorisation of age between young people and older voters, this dissertation deepens the analysis of age as a continuous variable, with quadratic terms, in order to capture more nuanced and non-linear patterns of electoral participation.

This study analyses electoral participation in Portugal between 2002 and 2025, seeking to understand whether young people’s lower propensity to vote should be interpreted as the expression of a generational rupture or, rather, as part of a life-cycle process. Based on data from the Portuguese Election Study (PES) (Lobo et al., 2024; Lobo et al., 2025), covering nine legislative elections, the research is inspired by the Age–Period–Cohort (APC) perspective, used in an exploratory manner to frame age, electoral period, and generational cohort effects simultaneously.

The results show that age constitutes a relevant determinant of electoral participation, but that its relationship with voting is not simply linear. The probability of participating tends to increase throughout youth and adulthood, reaching higher values in intermediate stages of life, and subsequently declining at older ages. In addition, relevant differences are observed between elections, suggesting that the political context of each electoral moment influences citizens’ mobilisation. In contrast, generational patterns prove less robust when sociodemographic, attitudinal, and political variables are controlled for.

The study contributes to the literature by showing that lower electoral participation among young people should not automatically be interpreted as evidence of a definitive generational rupture. On the contrary, the results point to the importance of life-cycle processes and of individuals’ progressive integration into the political sphere. By treating age as a continuous variable, this research allows for a more nuanced reading of electoral participation in Portugal, highlighting the internal heterogeneity of youth and the need to move beyond simplified comparisons between “young people” and “adults”.