ABSTRACT
Choosing a minimum voting age for an election is a decision that democratic countries make at some point in their history but remains an issue that is periodically revisited. And yet, we know too little about how legislators frame support or opposition to changing the voting age. This article uses frame analysis to explore the arguments made by Canadian legislators to support or oppose changes to its federal voting age. This article poses three research questions and examines two periods of parliamentary debates (1901–1972 and 1972–2022). The analysis finds that the arguments used by legislators in both periods changed very little and that Canadian legislators used changing the voting age as a tool to encourage young citizens to participate in formal institutions of the political process (such as voting) and to discourage youth from protesting or from taking political actions outside of formal institutions.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Dr. Luc Turgeon and Dr. André Lecours for their helpful feedback on early drafts of the manuscript.
Disclosure Statement
Valere Gaspard is a part-time employee at Elections Canada. His views do not reflect those of his employer.
Notes
1. On the impact of changing the voting age on voter turnout and participation, see Pammett (Citation2001), Wagner et al. (Citation2012), Bergh (Citation2013), Zandonella and Zeglovits (Citation2013), Franklin (Citation2020), Eichorn and Bergh (Citation2020), Mahéo and Bélanger (Citation2020), and Dassonneville et al. (Citation2021). For studies exploring which age groups may be sufficiently mature enough to exercise the right to vote, see Nelkin (Citation2020), Baumtrog (Citation2021), Hart et al. (Citation2021) and Munn (Citation2022). And for studies examining reasons to maintain or change a voting age, see Hyde (Citation2001), Cook (Citation2013), MacLeod (Citation2016), Rosenqvist (Citation2017), Takao (Citation2019); Poama and Volacu (Citation2021), Faas et al., (Citation2022), O’Neill (Citation2022), and Wall (Citation2022).
2. When proposing legislation, the legislator is not making an argument about why the voting age should be changed or maintained but is rather only proposing that it should be changed. Thus, it is not included as a frame in the larger dataset, therefore resulting in the “problem definition” category having no sub-frames or instances.
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Notes on contributors
Valere Gaspard
Valere Gaspard is a PhD candidate at the University of Ottawa, a Research Fellow at Western University and Trent University’s Leadership and Democracy Lab, and an alumnus of Canada’s Parliamentary Internship Programme. His research is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (CGS Doctoral award).
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1460-2881
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