What’s So Funny About Voting Rights For Children?

What’s So Funny about Voting Rights for Children?

DANIEL WEINSTOCK*

ABSTRACT

The case against extending the vote to children is usually grounded in conse-

quentialist rather than in categorial grounds. That is, it is thought that it would

be harmful to allow children to vote. But the denial of the voting rights of chil-

dren should satisfy a principle of realism; that is, it should not invoke conse-

quentialist criteria which would also rule out certain categories of adults. Nor

should it infer from the present level of relevant aptitudes of children that they

could under no circumstances increase their possession of relevant aptitudes,

since these levels are at least in part a function of the arrangements societies

have made to promote their development in children. Arguments to the effect

that children should be given only fractional votes or that they should be

granted the vote only under certain conditions do not satisfy these requirements.

Moreover, they are premised on a mistaken view about the nature of the

changes that introducing children into the pool of voters would give rise to, and

on an exaggerated view of the extent of the changes to electoral outcomes that

they would generate. Accommodations that we would need to put in place to

facilitate access to the vote would, moreover, largely be of a piece with the

kinds of accommodations that we make, or that we ought to make, for all voters.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 752

I. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 753

II. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 756

III. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 758

* Daniel Weinstock holds the Katharine A. Pearson Chair in the Faculty of Law and the Faculty of

Arts at McGill University. He was from 2002 to 2011 the Founding Director of the Centre de recherche

en e

´thique de l’Universite

´ de Montre

´al, and from 2013 to 2020 the Director of the Institute for Health

and Social Policy at McGill University. He has received a number of prestigious prizes for his academic

work, including the Charles Taylor Prize for Excellence in Research on Public Policy. He has held a

number of Visiting Professorships, including at Pompeu Fabra University and at the Australian National

University. © 2021, Daniel Weinstock.

Earlier versions of this paper were presented to a conference at Georgetown University on “The

Ethics of Democracy”, and at a Faculty seminar of the Law School at the Interdisciplinary Center in

Herzlyia, Israel. Thanks are due to both audiences for vigorous debate and discussion. In particular, I

wish to thank Jurgen De Wispelaere and Rivka Weill for extensive written comments.

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IV. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 764

V. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 768

CONCLUSION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 770

INTRODUCTION

The British political philosopher David Runciman recently caused a furor

when he suggested on his podcast Talking Politics that a possible remedy to some

of the ills presently aff‌licting the institutions of representative democracy in

advanced liberal democracies is that children as young as six be allowed to vote.

1

His argument is, in brief, that changing demography in advanced post-industrial

societies makes young citizens the perpetual losers in the democratic game. The

disaffection that this gives rise to is a (further) source of great risk for democra-

cies, one that would be partially allayed by giving the (very) young the vote.

Runciman’s argument has generated considerable backlash. How, ask those

who have attacked Runciman, could one possibly entrust decision-making about

state affairs to persons lacking the most basic cognitive capabilities for contem-

plating questions voters usually think about? Surely, this is some kind of joke!

2

There is little chance that Runciman’s proposal will ever make it on the politi-

cal agenda of any democracy (though more moderate proposals, that would, for

example, lower the voting age to sixteen or seventeen, already exist in a number

of places). The present paper therefore has an ideal-theoretical bent that distin-

guishes it from most of my previous work. In realist spirit, we should not be ask-

ing “how might we integrate children into the electorate?” Rather, we should be

asking, “given that children will never make it into the electorate, how can we

best protect their interests?” However, I believe it is worth considering some

institutional design issues that might arise if enfranchising children ever made it

onto the political agenda. This is for at least two reasons. First, you never know.

It may have seemed inconceivable at some points in the history of democracy

that women or non-propertied classes would get the right to vote. Though the

enfranchisement of children may not happen in my lifetime, it could still happen

at some point in the distant future, and so it is worth contemplating the modalities

through which this might occur. Second, considering both the potential harms of

allowing six-year-olds to vote, and the ways to offset those harms, might lead us

to think about (1) the harms of letting people presently enfranchised make signif‌i-

cant decisions and (2) the ways to offset those existing harms.

1. Democracy for Young People, TALKING POINTS (Dec. 5, 2018), https://play.acast.com/s/

talkingpolitics/democracyforyoungpeople?autoplay [https://perma.cc/Z95C-SBM4].

2. For an account of the controversy, see Matthew Weaver, Cambridge Academic Defends Idea of

Giving Six-Year-Olds the Vote, GUARDIAN (Dec. 13, 2018), https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/

dec/13/cambridge-academic-defends-idea-of-giving-children-the-vote [https://perma.cc/7ZFT-G9BP].

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