Votes for 6 year olds!
David Runciman's modest proposal
David Runciman’s suggestion is simple: we should lower the voting age to 6. He’s been spruiking this idea for a few years now so it wasn’t surprising when he presented it at FODI. Runciman’s position is:
Western democracies are tired and need to be reinvigorated. Such reinvigoration happens when the franchise is widened (e.g. non-property-owning men, women, non-white people). Lowering the voting age could be another invigoration.
The demographics of the developed world mean that the young are now a minority so children can’t take over.
We are willing to do far more dangerous things in our democracy (e.g. encourage armed insurrections) than lower the voting age.
Most of the arguments against giving children the vote were used against other groups (e.g. women) and proved to be incorrect.
Despite all this, he doesn’t think that such a change will ever happen.
Runciman was also involved in some research on this topic - where a series of political focus groups were undertaken with children in a school in Cambridgeshire. BTW the research seems to indicate that voting should start with 8 year olds.
Personally, I think this is worth experimenting with. I am not certain it will have positive outcomes but you don’t know until you try. The possible downsides seem minimal if the experiments are undertaken with care.
What does interest me are the circumstances in which children might get the vote:
I wonder if it is more likely to happen in developing countries with younger populations. A leader finding themselves likely to loose an election might open up the franchise to children if the leader thinks that the children might be more likely to vote for him. If the election is obviously dishonest then this might tarnish the idea globally.
Runciman makes the point that the franchise is often given as a reward for the sacrifice of a groups (e.g. following on from a war where a group have laid down their lives for the nation). This prompts two thoughts. Unfortunately you get child soldiers in the developing world - so this could be a part of the scenario in the previous point.
The other thought is that young people did make sacrifices during COVID. The virus was far more likely to kill the elderly than the young and yet the young had to submit to lockdown along with anyone else. The costs and the benefits fell disproportionately against them. But everyone seems to have forgotten about them now.
What do you think of this idea? For? Against? And do you think it will ever happen? If so, how?
It would be interesting to have a group like the AEC run a large scale pilot alongside an election to see what the outcome looked like: how differently that clock of voters would act compared to the existing one.
Would large families inadvertently have more political influence than singles and would the vulnerable elderly lose more sway?
I can’t help but think of the West Wing episode (S6E17) about that, and the concerns there were more around children being manipulated to vote one way or another, but I think you’ve addressed that already.