Why do people in the Star Wars galaxy elect such young leaders? An eighteen year old senator and not one but two fourteen year old queens? Imagine it's real life, not Star Wars, and you're at the polls: would you want the fate of your entire planet dependent on a barely pubescent teenager, no matter how intelligent or mature? I'm not criticizing the characters' abilities here; I'm wondering what the people who voted for them were thinking. Most people don't trust teenagers to clean their rooms, so why would they entrust them with a planet or a sector?

I could almost believe in the queens. They have a whole gaggle of advisors to help them. The elaboratel royal outfits indicate to me that office of king or queen of Naboo probably varies from being quite powerful to merely symbolic depending on who fills it - and on what is required at the time. When the planet is at peace and is being ignored like the backwater world it is, the bureaucracy is probably perfectly adequate, and the queen can afford to spend five hours a day primping. But it's still a difficult, demanding job; you'd think they'd want a queen who's at least a legal adult. Unless everyone's a legal adult at age ten in Star Wars. Which would be, to me, far more unbelievable than the midiclorians and the spaceships. Anyway, that state of affairs isn't always what they have, as was driven home to the Naboo rather painfully in The Phantom Menace. They just got stanging lucky that they had the Force and the Flanneled One to make sure their adolescent ruler was capable of saving their kaadus.

But what I really have a problem with is Leia being a member of the Imperial Senate in ANH. (I'm excluding twenty-something Senator Amidala because she was appointed, but I'll note that the lack of age limits for that system does exist with the consent of the citizens.) That means she represents at least fifty inhabited systems - that's trillions of people. She has several aids, no doubt, but she still has to be always on top of the issues for the whole sector so she can adequately represent it. She has to know thousands of laws and court precedents. She has to know the primary imports and exports of all fifty planets, the unemployment levels, the key political figures and their positions on everything, the positions and personalities of at leat several of her fellow senators, the customs of dozens of worlds, and she has to keep track of all the Emperor's new decrees and who his favorites are and who is about to disappear forever--and all that's not even the half of it. (And she's also a high-ranking member of the Rebellion, so she also has to secretly reallocate funds, run secret missions, recruit other senators, and watch her back.) That's a big job for anyone, and she's just a kid! Remember, even though we know Leia's abilities), most of her constituents don't. Yet they voted for her.

Leia is brilliant, articulate, principled, good at multitasking and prioritizing, mature for her age, and works incredibly well under pressure (just try to imagine doing anything taxing after being tortured - go on, try), but she's still eighteen years old. Most people would think, "There are so many things she just hasn't dealt with in life, or even in politics. No matter how brilliant she is, she's still had very few years to accrue information, let alone start putting all the pieces together into a big picture. That means that a lot of the situations she runs into in her Senate duties will be brand new for her." A lot of them probably have kids or grandkids her age. Yet they voted for her.

And since I don't know whether Mon Mothma was elected or appointed, let's include her on the Infant Senators list. She was the youngest senator ever elected at the time, beating Padme's record (22-23 years old), only to later lose her tiara to Leia. So she must have been between nineteen and twenty one.

Again, pretend it isn't a movie and you're at the polls: would you vote for someone who is considered hardly old enough to vote herself beause of her inexperience? I think not. There's a reason presidents are usually around fifty when they're elected instead of twenty. It's just too important a job for a greenhorn. For Force's sake, it was shocking when JFK was elected at the age of forty-two!

As a closing, I offer these excerpts from the United States Constitution:

"No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the age of twenty five Years" (Article I, Section 2).

"No Person shall be a Senator who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty Years" (Article I, Section 3).

"[N]either shall any person be eligible to that Office [the presidency] who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years" (Article II, Section 1).


Edit: I could have sworn I saw it written that Leia was elected to the Senate, but I can't find it, so I'll concede she might have been appointed. But even if she was appointed, it's still a system that has existed for over a thousand years with the consent of the governed--they did have legal recourse to change things for a long time. So in general it seems the citizens of her sector don't mind the possibility of being represented by a kid, even if it doesn't happen often.