In the past, the advent of ‘universal’ [male] suffrage was often celebrated as the pinnacle of progress in representative democracy. Looking back, we now see that despite all the Enlightenment’s grand talk about human reason and equality, its thinkers couldn’t even acknowledge the basic moral and political status of women. But we shouldn’t be too quick to judge the past, because ‘universal’ suffrage is still a complete misnomer today. In every country on Earth, significant populations are legally restricted from voting. While they are not the only relevant group of people, I’ll focus here on one demographic: children, i.e., people under the age of 18 (or 16, depending on the country).
If we look at the common arguments for why people should be able to vote in general, most of them would apply to children. I’ll mention a few:
“Governments have power over people’s lives, so people should have a say in who governs them and what laws are made”: Governments have power over children’s lives.
“Voting reflects the idea that each person’s interests matter”: Children’s interests matter.
“Voting gives people a way to defend their needs, values, and freedoms by choosing leaders and policies that represent them”: Children have needs, values, and freedoms they would defend.
Even when people defend voting for adults, they use very broad rhetoric that would only make sense if, at the same time, they didn’t find it justified to exclude large parts of the population. For some examples, I’ll link this reddit post.
So, what do democracy advocates say? Who actually should have the right to vote and based on what principle? Can we defend the status quo? I’ll clarify that I am not advocating for children being able to vote myself. For all I know, voting doesn’t make any sense anyway. I want to know two things:
- Can the democracy advocate defend the status quo?
- Would a (good) principled way to determine who has the right to vote exclude children?
This discussion started in The Shoutbox, and the answer I got was that children would do what their parents tell them to do, leading to disproportionate power for people with children. But this is, at best, underspecified. There is no disproportionate power, as it’s still one person, one vote. Or there is, but that’s just a feature of democracy; if there are more white people, for example, then we can say white people have disproportionate power. And sure, children could get their ideas about who to vote for from their parents, just like adults can get their ideas about who to vote for from their parents, news sources, their friends, the politicians, etc.