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ABSTRACT
Most laypersons and political theorists endorse the claims that (1) all adults should be enfranchised and (2) all children should be disenfranchised. The first claim rejects epistocracy; the second is a commitment to a minimum voting age. I call the conjunction of these two claims mainstream democracy. In this paper, I argue that mainstream democracy is in a predicament: it cannot consistently maintain both (1) and (2). Given that we oppose epistocracy, we must endorse the enfranchisement of children. To make this point, I first develop what I take to be the most plausible argument for mainstream democracy, derived from David Estlund's epistemic proceduralism. In the second part of the paper, I explain why this argument fails. In the third part, I address some practical concerns about enfranchising children. I conclude that abandoning mainstream democracy is not problematic because the enfranchisement of children is unlikely to have harmful consequences.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Adam Etinson, Jessica Brown, Eline Gerritsen, Joe Bowen, Saranga Sudarshan, Andreas Sorger, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on previous drafts of this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Most democracies exclude at least some adults from the electorate, e.g. mentally disabled persons, felons, foreign residents, or expatriates (see Beckman Citation2009 and López-Guerra Citation2014). This does not affect my argument in this paper, however: presumably, it can just as well be applied to the case for the enfranchisement of mentally disabled persons; and the exclusion of felons, foreign residents and expatriates raises issues different from the ones discussed here because it is not based on a presumption of their political incompetence. I therefore flag these restrictions when I henceforth talk of the enfranchisement of ‘all adults’.
2 For recent contributions to the debate about lowering the voting age to 16, cf. Cowley and Denver (Citation2004), Chan and Clayton (Citation2006), Hart and Atkins (Citation2011), Zeglovits (Citation2013), and Peto (Citation2017).
3 Cf. Caplan (Citation2009) and Brennan (Citation2011). Note that not all forms of epistocracy restrict the electorate. John Stuart Mill (Citation2010) proposed a plural voting scheme in which politically knowledgeable citizens receive additional votes. Cf. Mulligan (Citation2018) and Jeffrey (Citation2018) for contemporary endorsements of forms of epistocracy that do not restrict the suffrage, and Holst (Citation2012) for an overview of possible versions of epistocracy.
4 Obviously, the claim that none of the alternative approaches to justify the enfranchisement of all adults is suitable to simultaneously justify the disenfranchisement of children would require a lot of argument, which I cannot provide here. Some readers might not accept my assumption that an argument from competence, derived from epistemic proceduralism, yields the strongest defence of mainstream democracy in the first place. But I hope that even they will find my argument intriguing, as it shows that a prima facie plausible justification for the enfranchisement of all and only adults fails.
5 He briefly touches upon the issue in a footnote (Estlund Citation2003, 68, note 17): ‘The disenfranchisement of children is [a] formal inequality I am inclined to defend. (…) it raises an important challenge to my main line of argument, as Francis Shrag [sic] has suggested to me’. My purpose in this paper is to elaborate this challenge.
6 For proceduralist accounts of democracy, see e.g. Peter (Citation2008), Buck (Citation2012), Urbinati (Citation2014), and Hill (Citation2016).
7 Here we may further ask whether a decision needs to maximise the public good in order to qualify as ‘correct’, or whether it suffices to satisfy the public good in some weaker sense. I will say more about this issue in section 2.2.
8 I thank an anonymous reviewer for pressing me to clarify this point.
9 Estlund does not give a full account of when an objection is qualified. He subscribes to the liberal view that not all objections qualify as justification-defeaters for a proposed political procedure – that would be overinclusive – and that not only true objections qualify as justification-defeaters – that that would be underinclusive (cf. Estlund Citation2008, chapter 3). Within these broad constraints, there is a range of possible viewpoints from which qualified objections may be raised.
10 For the epistocratic opposition against the objection, cf. Mulligan (Citation2015) and Brennan (Citation2018).
11 Brennan (Citation2011) and Lippert-Rasmussen (Citation2012) note the same. They, however, do not regard this as an argument for the enfranchisement of children but rather a reductio ad absurdum of the demographic objection.
12 Another way of showing that age-based disenfranchisement is acceptable to all qualified points of view might be to demonstrate that it is necessary to protect the wellbeing of children, epistemic considerations regarding the competence of the electorate aside (I thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this point). I address this line of argument in part 3.
13 For further discussion, see Chan and Clayton (Citation2006, 539f.), Munn (Citation2012, 1056f.) and Umbers (Citation2018).
14 See e.g. Schrag (Citation1975), Clayton (Citation2006), Brighouse and Fleurbaey (Citation2010), and Rehfeld (Citation2011).
15 This is why some authors (cf. Peto Citation2017; Umbers Citation2018) have suggested that concerns for the epistemic quality of electoral decisions actually recommend the enfranchisement of children. Children have a distinct social perspective that may foster more integrated evaluations of public policy. Although I am sympathetic to this line of argument, I will not pursue it here. Instead, I argue that the disenfranchisement of children cannot be justified even if they do not make an epistemically valuable contribution to the electorate.
16 In contrast, disenfranchising everyone below the age of 40 is not necessary to prevent it. Mainstream democrats could therefore explain why they oppose James Mill's proposal but endorse a lower age limit for voting, although the disenfranchisement would be egalitarian and temporary in both cases.
17 In that case, the argument would, in Lau’s (Citation2012, 865) words, still ‘hold but not actually obtain’.
18 See the results of the last ‘U18 Election’ in Germany, held every four years one week before the general election. It is worth noting that, despite some differences, the overall voting pattern was not so different from the outcome of the general election. Cf. https://www.u18.org/bundestagswahl-2017/wahlergebnisse/ [retrieved 17 August 2019].
19 Of course, one might fear that obtrusive guardians will make their children vote despite their disinterest. I address this concern in the next part.
20 Cook frames this point in explicitly Estlundian terms. Literacy and independence, he argues, constitute ‘a thinner notion of electoral competence that is acceptable to all qualified points of view’ (Cook Citation2013, 450).
21 For similar proposals, cf. Kiesewetter (Citation2009, 252) and Tremmel and Wilhelm (Citation2015, 139).
22 For an argument against the enfranchisement of children grounded in their interest in play, cf. Beckman (Citation2009, 114–119). Cf. Merry and Schinkel (Citation2016, 205f.) for a critique.
23 The argument that earlier participation is conducive to long-term interest in politics is often made in debates about lowering the voting age: cf. Zeglovits and Zandonella (Citation2013, 1089) and Umbers (Citation2018). For the contrary argument that lowering the voting age will negatively impact long-term turnouts, cf. Chan and Clayton (Citation2006, 554).