Youth are affected by local political issues as much as anyone. They also work without limits on hours and pay taxes on their income, can drive in most states, and in some cases, are tried in adult courts. Sixteen- and year-olds deserve the right to vote on issues that affect them on the local level.
Further, voting is the most reliable way for ordinary citizens to influence the government. This is not to say, that civil society groups were not involved in discussions about a lower voting age, but in the majority of cases the change was initiated by incumbent government parties. In some instances, new laws were adopted uniformly across the whole country, often connected with wider reform agendas e.
In other places, regional party groups and later on national parties advocating for a lower voting age could gradually adopt the position in their respective manifestos, after having seen the implementation by their colleagues in power in other regions of the country, such as in Germany or Austria Aichholzer and Kritzinger, ; Leininger and Faas, While other civil society organisations also supported and even campaigned for the measures, the decision to make votes at 16 part of party platforms and to implement it when in power, were commonly driven by dynamics internal to the party structures.
While top-down dynamics have been more prominent in the early s, the interplay between civil society and central actors within each national party-political system can be more complex nevertheless.
In Estonia, for example, the idea to extend the franchise to and year-olds was popularised by a major youth organisation in the country Explanatory Memorandum, , but then largely taken up and developed as a project with ownership by certain actors within the government in a more top-down fashion Toots and Idnurm, In the Scottish context, we also saw an interplay of actors.
The initial impetus for change was very much top-down and directed by the Scottish Government, run by the Scottish National Party Huebner and Eichhorn, However, the proposal also gained support from others, including unionist opposition parties Labour and the Liberal Democrats. Subsequently, many youth organisations and institutions became involved, including the Scottish Youth Parliament which made votes at 16 a major campaign issue SYP, The new franchise, initially only implemented for the independence referendum of , was ultimately adopted for all Scottish elections by the Scottish Parliament in As we have seen, debates about the voting age have not taken one singular format.
On the one hand this reflects the particular political context within which they emerge. But examining the difference in approaches to franchise changes matters also in terms of the likelihood of official and popular support more widely. Successful campaigns usually built on bottom-up approaches that were directed by young people themselves, but also developed significant buy-in from certain political actors.
Bigger, national campaigns on the issue have emerged see, e. In countries where top-down implementation of franchise changes were successful, the issue typically was less politicised overall. However, when debates about the voting age entered the public realm, its fit with discussions in the broader political context and the engagement of civil society actors are of great importance to understand how and why the voting age was lowered in some countries at particular points in time.
In the next section, we will turn to the insights from empirical studies in the countries that lowered their voting age to examine what arguments were found to be supported in practice and which ones were not. As is clear from even the most casual look at the list of countries in Table 1 , the vast majority of countries in the world that hold democratic elections have not lowered the voting age below In a number of these countries, especially in Europe and North America, there is some ongoing debate about the issue.
Political parties on the centre-left tend to favour lowering the voting age and may bring it up occasionally. Sometimes, when there is a debate about reforming electoral laws the voting age issue may also come up. While some of the debates are strictly normative in nature, others lend themselves more easily to research and to empirical testing. The normative debates may deal with definitions of what it means to be a voter in relation to other markers of adulthood Electoral Commission, a —discussions about which already marked the process of lowering the voting age from 21 to 18 several decades ago Loughran et al.
Such debates include, for instance, the question whether voters should be legally and financially independent of their parents or whether youth should be given more political influence through a lower voting age to counter the voting power of a growing elderly population. When it comes to empirically testable propositions or arguments, the most often referenced issue is that of voter turnout. We know that younger people generally tend to have lower rates of turnout than others, which may make some sceptical of further extending the franchise Youth Citizenship Commission, Others argue that giving young people the chance to vote earlier in life will also give them a habit of voting that over time will have a positive effect on turnout levels Champion, Some have also questioned whether young people are able to use their vote in a sensible way, asserting that they may lack the necessary maturity Chan and Clayton, Both of these issues, turnout and voting among enfranchised and year-olds, can be studied empirically in countries that have in fact lowered the voting age to There is also some debate about the wider impact of civic engagement and how voting at 16 may affect the political debate and the system more widely.
We look at each of these issues in turn below. In his influential book, Voter Turnout and the Dynamics of Electoral Competition in Established Democracies Since , Mark Franklin argues that the decline in turnout in established democracies since the s can be traced back to when the voting age was lowered to Most democracies in Europe and elsewhere changed the age of eligibility from 20 or 21 to 18 in the s or s.
Granting voting rights at the age of 18 became the norm in practically the entire democratic world in this period. In terms of turnout, this was a mistake, according to Franklin By granting voting rights to young people at a time when, in most countries, they are in a transitional phase in their lives after high school, dampens turnout among first time voters. When people do not take part in their first eligible election, they may learn the habit of not voting, which could then lead to a lifetime of abstention or just sporadic voter participation.
This is exactly what has happened since the s, according to Franklin , as turnout has declined in almost all established democracies. Based on this, he hypothesises that a further reduction of the voting age could actually have a beneficial effect on future trends in turnout. Giving young people a chance to take part in democracy at a time when they are still, for the most part, in high school and living in a community that they know could spur higher rates of turnout among first time voters.
Young people may then learn the habit of voting, rather than abstention, which over time will lead to rising aggregate turnout levels. In a new publication, Franklin takes up the second part of the argument that a lower voting age will over time, due to generational replacement, lead to higher aggregate rates of turnout.
By studying trends in voter turnout in countries that have had a voting age of 16 for some time, specifically Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Ecuador and Nicaragua, he is able to conduct the first empirical test of that proposition. The results of analyses of both aggregate and individual level data indicate that indeed there is a substantive positive effect on turnout in these countries in the long run. These effects are somewhat imprecisely measured, because of limitations in the data; the main limitation being that the data cover a relatively short time span in just a handful of countries.
We may not yet know the full effect of lowering the voting age on the still young generation of voters who had the chance to vote when they were 16 or However, no negative consequences for turnout from lowering the voting age to 18 were found at these more current reductions to 16; rather there were statistically significant positive effects. Will the granting of voting rights to additional young citizens have a political effect?
On this question, the evidence is quite mixed from one country to the next, and even within countries. Franklin finds that there is a moderate rise in voter volatility when the voting age is lowered. Young people may switch their vote more often than the older voters. In most countries, the young people tend to support centre-left or green parties in somewhat higher numbers than adults, but this is by no means an iron law and support for centre-right and right-wing parties amongst young voters in the last Austrian federal elections was high ORF, Also, there is further nuance: in several German states, year-olds were often less likely than the general public to vote for parties whose primary position is left or centre-left, but instead often opted for the Green Party at much higher rates than the overall population Leininger and Faas, Also, views can indeed change more within this age group, it appears, as Franklin suggested.
In Scotland, for example, year-olds initially were less supportive of Scottish independence than the overall public Eichhorn et al. By the time of the independence referendum of , however, many had changed their views with the majority of them embracing independence Fraser, at greater rates than Scots overall. All types of proposed or implemented changes in electoral law or in the institution of elections, raises the issue of democratic legitimacy.
Will the changes have an effect on the legitimacy of elections and on support for democracy, more widely? This is also an issue that has come up in the voting age debate.
Sanhueza Petrarca study the effect of lowering the voting age on political trust and support for democracy in Latin America. She finds consistently positive effects. Voters that were given the right to vote at 16 show higher levels of political trust and greater support for democracy than other voters.
Similarly, Aichholzer and Kritzinger find that Austrian voters at the age of 16 and 17 show greater levels of support for democracy and external political efficacy than other voters.
Furthermore, an increase in the overall political interest in the age group could also be observed Zeglovits and Zandonella, These findings are suggestive of a genuine benefit of lowering the voting age to 16, however, nuanced differences can be observed here as well.
Research in Scotland, for example, has found that and year-olds in Scotland after enfranchisement had greater levels of several pro-civic attitudes compared with their unfranchised counterparts of the same age in the rest of the UK. But the strength of attitudes was not consistent across all domains.
This gives us an awareness and appreciation of local issues. Because of the habitual nature of voting, encouraging new voters at a younger age will increase voter turnout as the population gets older. Young people who vote also influence the voter turnout of their parents. In a study of the Kids Voting program where people under 18 were allowed to cast votes in a mock election , parents who had children participating in the program were more likely to vote in the actual election.
Lowering the voting age will improve the lives of youth. Young people have a right to be heard and to have our interests taken seriously. However, by disenfranchising young people society tells us that we do not have anything of value to add to the political conversations in our society. It also gives politicians permission to ignore our interests as people under 18 have no way to hold their representatives accountable.
This is especially concerning since there are certain issues, such as environmental degradation, public education policy, long-term government debt, corporal punishment laws, and poverty that impact young people more than anyone else.
Younger people may also be better in tune with modern issues around internet privacy and social media use. But since young people are underrepresented in politics, the issues affecting us are underrepresented as well. Lowering the voting age will also help to increase the civic engagement of young people. The words spoken before the Senate Judiciary Committee supporting lowering the voting age in are as true then as they are now:.
Lowering the voting age will provide them with a direct, constructive and democratic channel for making their views felt and for giving them a responsible stake in the future of the nation.
Code Cong. News at pp. Knowledge and experience are not criteria for voting eligibility. Even though young people can be as politically informed as older people, there is no requirement that either group have any political knowledge at all.
In fact, whenever tests have been used to register voters, it has always been about preventing certain groups of people from having political power rather than making sure the electorate is as informed as possible. Because of their discriminatory nature, knowledge or literacy tests are not used anywhere in the United States. If you are diagnosed with a developmental delay or experience a brain injury, you do not automatically lose your right to vote and in fact, many states have passed laws that expressly ensure that you retain the right to vote unless it has been removed in a court of law.
There are no wrong votes. It can be easy to feel baffled by the way other people vote, even if we know them very well. Many people believe that there are voters who are completely ignorant of the issues, woefully misguided about the economy, who get their political ideas from biased media, vote for candidates based on their personality, and are completely naive about the world.
And yet, disenfranchising people simply because we disagree with them is not considered a serious position, unless that group happens to be disenfranchised already. No advocate for lowering the voting age believes that young people will always vote intelligently, especially since not everyone can agree on what that means. But the same can be said for adults. As such it is claimed that they are more than capable of being able to vote.
Where concern is expressed about the knowledge and experience possessed by people aged 16 and year-olds, campaigners warn that this is the same line of argument, that has been misused to disenfranchise certain adult groups in the past.
Moreover, it is pointed out that voting at 18 remains the norm across the overwhelming majority of the democratic world. Most other countries also feel, that the age of 18, best represents the appropriate age of maturity in regard to voting. This has previously been used as an argument for increasing the voting age to 21, or even 25 as per the Italian Upper Chamber. Low Voter Turnout It is pointed out that when young people do gain the right to vote, this cohort exercises that right far less than the population as a whole.
Accordingly it is suggested that simply giving more young people the vote, is not the solution towards boosting political engagement amongst youth groups. Moreover, these low turnout figures, suggest that extending the franchise is not an important issue for many young people themselves.
Political Expediency Opponents of changing the current system point to the fact that all existing adult voters have themselves had to wait until they were18 before they were able to vote. As such it is only fair, that current young people should do the same. It is suggested that many of those calling for the lowering of the voting age are also motivated by political self interest.
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