Lowering the voting age

A few years ago I advocated lowering the voting age to six on the grounds that it would inject some fresh life into our democracy. 

Any audience to whom I suggested this idea tended to respond with derision and outrage. There were many objections but two that stood out were either that children were far too ill-informed and unpredictable to be allowed to vote, or that children were far too predictable to be allowed to vote – they were all bound to be left-wing because that’s what kids are like. 

This second charge amounted to an accusation of gerrymandering – lowering the voting age was just a way to boost the anti-Tory electorate. Or so I was told. 

The Daily Mail published an article implying I should be stripped of my Cambridge professorship for promoting something so obviously part of the giant anti-Brexit conspiracy.

My response was that these things can’t both be true: kids can’t both be an unknown quantity and also entirely predictable. In fact, how children would vote is not at all predictable because we hardly ever ask them their political views. Allowing them to vote would be the best way of finding out.

The voting age is not going to be lowered to six any time soon, if ever. But the Labour Party’s manifesto for this election includes a pledge to lower it to sixteen, which has prompted the familiar accusation that this is just another attempt to harvest more left-leaning voters. Yet no one should assume they know how young people are going to vote – the point of any democracy worthy of the name is that it should be unpredictable.

This has been demonstrated recently. The voting age was lowered to sixteen in Germany, Belgium and Greece for the recent European parliament elections, in which populist parties – notably the AfD in Germany – performed well. They did well among the youngest voters too (16% of 16–24-year-olds voted for the AfD). 

In France young voters turned out in large numbers for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally. In the US there is evidence that more and more younger people are attracted by the politics of Donald Trump.

CNN’s report on the German elections was headlined: ‘This Country’s 16-year-olds Voted for the First Time. The Results are Scary.’ Here is the other familiar charge against letting young people vote: they aren’t to be trusted because they are too easily led astray (the subtext in this case being that the populists have been performing better with the young than traditional parties by being more adept on TikTok). 

But in fact younger voters were just doing what many other voters were doing too – expressing their dissatisfaction with the status quo.

Polling evidence suggests that young people are at least as disillusioned with the current state of democratic politics as older voters and perhaps even more so.  This is hardly surprising, given that democratic politics makes so little attempt to take account of their views. 

Elections tend to be decided by the preferences of pensioners, who are the most numerous subsection of the population (there are more voters aged over sixty than under forty) and the ones who turn out to vote in the highest numbers. Letting children vote would not unbalance the age profile of the electorate. It would rebalance it.

It is sometimes argued that adults take account of the interests of children when they vote, as it used to be argued that husbands take account of the interests of their wives. That sort of Victorian paternalism (or grand-paternalism, since it’s often grandparents who are doing the voting) doesn’t hold much water anymore. So why should we think it applies to the views of young people?  Anyone who is capable of expressing a preference – as young people certainly are – should be allowed a direct input into democratic politics. And politicians should be expected to take heed.

16-year-olds will not be voting in the coming election but if Labour wins and is true to its manifesto pledge they will be in the next one. No one should assume they know in advance what that will mean. It will depend on how well a Labour government does in meeting their expectations. If younger voters follow their continental counterparts in embracing radical alternatives on either the left or the right that is not a sign that they are not fit for democratic responsibilities. It would be a sign that democracy is working as it should – and that the politicians really need to pay attention.

Prof David Runciman hosts the podcast Past Present Future. His new series about the ideas behind UK general elections is available now.

_{Images:
Top: Collage of British General Election icons - smartboy10/Getty
Middle: Teacher holding a vote with class of primary school children - 10'000 Hours/Getty}