As the planet sizzled, making last year the hottest-ever recorded, attempts to rescue it from global warming crashed and burned in Dubai. Something has to give after the unconscionable failure to produce a workable plan at CoP-28. And that something could be a politically groundbreaking proposition: a drastic lowering of the age of suffrage to give a voice to precisely those whose future is being incinerated in the bonfire of fossil fuels’ vanities. In the context of intergenerational justice, a drastic lowering of the age of suffrage would extend the Bill of Rights to those who have been expounding considered climate solutions rather than the venal cabals that currently rule.
There are, however, practical questions like how low is low? The number will have to be somewhat arbitrary, but no more so than the current 16-21. Up until the 1990s, 21 was the most common minimum age of suffrage. Some countries in the Americas and in Europe lowered this to 18 in the 1970s. Others followed in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Now 18 is the minimum for most countries. Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Cuba, Ecuador, Iceland and Nicaragua have lowered it to 16, with their respective Green Parties pushing for this change. Indonesia, Greece, North Korea and East Timor, among others, have made it 17. But there has been a push to lower the age of voting further to make suffrage closer to the universal that liberal democracy claims. It’s crucial, some say, for civic education to translate into civic engagement.
Much of the education and engagement is about climate, as the emergence of an army of teenage activists in the past few years has shown, starting with Greta Thunberg’s explosive impact on the stage of climate activism in 2018 at the age of 15. A compelling case has been made by David Runciman, a Cambridge University professor, who advocates lowering the voting age to six. He argues that the elderly demographic profile and geographic distribution in the increasingly polarised and fractious countries of the Global North and elsewhere have tipped electoral outcomes in favour of the old. It’s not that the young couldn’t be bothered to vote as often supposed; they don’t show up because the decks are stacked.
This skew is compounded by the age of elected representatives, which is typically the 50s. In India, too, the average MP is in the 50s, but this hides the fact that only a small number is under 40, while the over 60s contribute significantly, completely against the grain of the demographic profile. This is one good reason to enfranchise the young — whether six or 13 should be the floor is a detail. The other reason, as Runciman argues, is that there is no good reason not to. The competence test comes first. The question is, are the very old, who can vote, always competent? This test has been used against women, the colonised, the uneducated and the poor at various points, and discarded.
Finally, Runciman dispatches the ‘responsibilities’ argument: why expose women and children to harsh realities? This distils the problem. Any restrictive approach to enfranchisement is paternalistic and status quoist. But, as Runciman says, allowing six year olds to vote would probably not be suddenly transformative because mass enfranchisement seldom is. What it would do is enrich the political process by making universal franchise as universal as possible.
We don’t have to go all the way with Runciman, but lowering the voting age to enfranchise students beginning middle school wouldn’t be bizarre. Enlarging the franchise and empowering the young would make political systems more representative, pushing the causes of intergenerational justice, rights and constructive climate-change politics to the forefront.
Suhit K. Sen is the author of The Paradox of Populism: The Indira Gandhi Years, 1966-77
