Should the voting age be lowered to six years old? One academic believes so, arguing it would “reinvigorate democracy” and counterbalance the power of older voters.
David Runciman, a Cambridge politics professor and host of the podcasts Talking Politics and Past Present Future, believes the best way to get democracy moving again after it’s become stuck in a rut is to extend the franchise.
“People are really terrified of changing the way we do democracy, [but at the same time] people are pissed off with democracy. There is a lot of survey evidence that people are losing confidence in it, particularly young people,” he tells Crikey.
“The party system is frozen. The kind of politicians we get are this kind of subset of the population; it’s very predictable. It really annoys people, and what it needs is reinvigorating.”
Runciman, who is giving a keynote speech at Sydney’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas later this month, is well-armed with justifications for his proposition.
“I think in the back of people’s minds, they think that democracy is different than it actually is. They think somehow you get the vote because you’re qualified or competent. But that’s not true — everyone over 16 or 18 or so, depending on where you live, gets to vote,” he says.
“Part of what is driving this argument is that we live in societies where the population is increasingly elderly, and elections almost everywhere in the Western world are decided by older voters because there are so many of them. In Britain, Brexit happened because older voters voted for it, and the Conservatives were in power for 15 years because older voters voted for it.
“I’m not saying that you should enfranchise children so that they vote differently, but the fact is that we don’t take votes away from people when they become incompetent, and we know in aging populations that people acquire cognitive abilities, and they lose them.”
Runciman says the idea came to him when he was reading a book on the history of American democracy, which noted that waves of enfranchisement — extending the vote to non-property-holding white men, then to religious minorities, women, racial minorities and African-Americans — had “injected energy and optimism” into the democratic system.
“The things people said about women getting the vote are just what they say now about the thought of kids getting the vote: they don’t know anything, they’ll just do what their husbands say, they’re all left wing. It was all rubbish, and it turned out women were just as varied as men,” Runciman says.
There’s an obvious counterargument to the comparison with the opposition to enfranchising women: while it was incorrect to suppose women had worse cognitive abilities than men, children tend to have a lower capacity for anticipating the consequences of their actions compared with adolescents and adults.
Runciman acknowledges this, but says it comes back to the idea of universal franchise.
“I’m all for everybody voting. It’s true that a lot of kids would be less competent than a lot of adults. But trust me, I’ve spoken to kids, and some of them are more competent than some of the adults I know,” he says.
“We can overstate the extent to which voting is a competence business — we don’t apply that test to adults, so why should we apply it to kids? I agree the analogy [with female enfranchisement] breaks down, but I don’t think for that reason the argument doesn’t work.”
Runciman believes that by allowing young children to vote, politicians would be less incentivised to pander to older demographics and begin paying attention to the youth. He thinks it might even force politicians to behave better, knowing children are watching, and for advertising and campaigning rules to be tightened in favour of truthfulness and civility.
“We live in a world where we’re happy for democratic politicians not to do anything about climate change, and to risk nuclear war — that’s where all the dangers are. On that scale, [enfranchising children] is way down there, but people react to it as if it was the scariest thing,” he says.
Lowering the voting age by 12 years would be radical — but that’s the point, according to Runciman. He argues it is a needed jolt of mass enfranchisement. Lowering the voting age to 16 or 17, which has happened in countries like Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Ecuador, Greece, Indonesia and Timor-Leste, just means “more of the same politics”, according to Runciman.
Indeed, there is compelling evidence that lowering the voting age to 16 would be relatively uncontroversial from a developmental science perspective. In 2022, a pair of researchers wrote in the Rutgers University Law Review that “the field’s robust evidence-base concludes that the development of logical reasoning is complete by age 16, an age at which research has well documented adolescents’ capacities for cognitive decision-making, paid labor, and family and societal contributions”.
The United Nations children’s welfare agency UNICEF has noted that “a significant proportion of scientists in the neurodevelopmental field have argued that lowering the voting age is in line with current evidence around adolescent brain development” and that “a considerable number of experts also assert that a 16-year-old has sufficient cognitive and critical thinking capacities to make political decisions independently”.
In Australia, debate frequently rages about whether the voting age should be lowered to 16. When Greens Senator Jordon Steele-John introduced an unsuccessful bill to that effect in 2018, opponents included the Young Liberals, which wrote in a submission that the proposition was “an ill-designed and poorly masked attempt by the Australian Greens to increase their vote share in Australia”. In 2023, Greens MP Stephen Bates introduced a similar bill, which also died due to lack of support.
In June, a pair of 16-year-olds aligned with the Labor Party and the activist group Make It 16 argued in an opinion piece for Crikey that younger teenagers should get a say because they will bear the brunt of many issues at hand in the next federal election, including the housing crisis, climate crisis, gendered violence and cost of living.
In the course of reporting this story, Crikey interviewed a nine-year-old and a six-year-old — with their parents’ permission — about what they thought about Runciman’s proposal.
The nine-year-old said she believed six-year-olds were too young to vote: “When you’re six you don’t know what you’re getting into, you don’t understand how serious it is. Maybe it could be 16 or 17.”
The six-year-old, when asked if she thought she and her peers should get the right to vote, replied: “I don’t even know what that is.”
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