The politics of lowering the voting age in Australia: Evaluating the evidence

Abstract

There is a vigorous international debate about lowering the voting age to 16, with some jurisdictions already moving in this direction. The issue of the voting age also intersects with broader normative and empirical approaches to youth political engagement. Using evidence from Australia, this article evaluates empirically the arguments put forward for lowering the voting age. The findings suggest only partial support for lowering the voting age to bring it into line with other government-regulated activities. There is no evidence that lowering the voting age would increase political participation or that young people are more politically mature today than they were in the past. The absence of empirical support for the arguments in favour of lowering of the voting age has implications for how to transform democracy in order to attract greater youth engagement.

是否把选举年龄降到16岁，国际上有着激烈的辩论。有些法律体系已在朝这个方向运动。选举年龄的话题与更广泛的、有关青年政治参与的规范性及经验性研究有所交集。本文根据澳大利亚的资料，从实证的角度评论了主张降低投票年龄的观点。本文的发见仅部分支持降低选举年龄与有关政府法规的接轨。现在无法证明降低选举年龄会提高政治参与，也无法证明今天的年轻人比过去的年轻人政治上更成熟。降低选举年龄的主张缺少实证的支持，那么该如何改变民主制度以吸引年轻人更多的参与呢？

Keywords:

• elections
• franchise
• voting

Notes

^†An earlier version of this article was delivered at the Australian Electoral Commission Research Forum, Canberra, 19–20 November 2012. The 2007 and 2010 Australian Election Study surveys were collected by Ian McAllister, Juliet Pietsch, Clive Bean and Rachel Gibson and funded by the Australian Research Council. The 1987–2004 Australian Election Studies were collected by a variety of collaborators. All of the data are publicly available from the Australian Data Archive (<http://www.ada.edu.au/>).

¹Between 1972 and 1974, the registered electorate rose from 7,074,070 to 7,898,922, an increase of 824,852. Concurrently, the population rose from 12,960,000 to 13,340,000, an increase of 380,000 (International IDEA 2012).

²Contemporaneous reviews of these debates can be found in Beck and Jennings (1969) and Megyery (1991).

³Notable exceptions are Chan and Clayton (2006), Cowley and Denver (2004) and Pammett and Myles (1991).

⁴There is also an extensive literature on citizenship and voting rights in the USA, stemming from the large illegal migrant population (Hayduk 2005).

⁵The 1918 election was itself affected by the disruption caused by the end of the First World War and the extension of the franchise to women aged over 30. Turnout increased slightly, to 61.4 per cent in 2005, and 65.1 per cent in 2010.

⁶The other means were decentralising power, reforming the electoral system and introducing citizen-initiated legislation (White 2006).

⁷Paragraph 10 of the agreement between the two government states:

The Scottish Government's consultation on the referendum also set out a proposal for extending the franchise to allow 16- and 17-year-olds to vote in the referendum. It will be for the Scottish Government to decide whether to propose extending the franchise for this referendum and how that should be done. It will be for the Scottish Parliament to approve the referendum franchise, as it would be for any referendum on devolved matters. (UK government 2012)

⁸The arguments for and against are well summarised in Cowley and Denver (2004) and Folkes (2007).

⁹The average age of the 58,148 military personnel who were killed was 23.1 years.

¹⁰In the USA, Edward Kennedy, a strong advocate of lowering the voting age to 18, put it as follows: ‘At the very least, the opportunity to vote should be granted in recognition of the risks an 18 year-old is obliged to assume when he is sent off to fight and perhaps die for his country’ (Kennedy 2011).

¹¹Australia and Belgium are excluded because they have compulsory voting, and the Netherlands is excluded because compulsory voting was abolished in the year that the voting age was lowered. The pre-change estimate for Spain is based on one election, as only one election was held after the fall of the Franco dictatorship prior to lowering the voting age.

¹²An examination of the distribution of responses by age between the two surveys showed few or no differences.

¹³In the election immediately following that change, turnout was 79.1 per cent, and in the second election after the change, it was 83.1 per cent (Irwin 1974).

¹⁴Since the AES sampled registered electors, we are unable to measure the views of those aged 16 or 17. However, there is evidence from the Youth Electoral Study (Saha, Print, and Edwards 2007) that intention to vote and electoral participation are similar among 16- and 17 year-olds as among our 18- and 19-year-olds from the AES. Political behaviour among 18- and 19-year-olds in the AES is, therefore, a reasonable proxy for these slightly younger counterparts.

¹⁵In the 1967 and 1969 surveys, the young are aged 21–24, and from 1979 onwards, 18–24.

¹⁶There are known difficulties and limitations in measuring political knowledge (Mondak 1999; 2001).

¹⁷The questions were: ‘Australia became a Federation in 1901’; ‘The Senate election is based on proportional representation’; ‘The Constitution can only be changed by the High Court’; ‘No-one may stand for Federal Parliament unless they pay a deposit’; ‘The longest time allowed between Federal elections for the House of Representatives is four years’; ‘There are 75 members of the House of Representatives’. Statements 1, 2 and 4 are correct, and statements 3, 5 and 6 are incorrect.