Should We Increase the Voting Power of the Young?

This paper gives reasons for why states should increase the political influence of their younger members. More specifically, I shall defend a general scheme for age-weighting of votes which gradually reduces a member’s influence in her collective’s political affairs, as she grows older. My argument proceeds in two stages. First, I outline a general (mostly intuitive) case for age-weighting of votes. I then consider whether that general case is compatible with – and might even be supported by – a set of prominent theories of collective self-determination rights, namely, those that ground such rights in respect for personal autonomy. According to those theories, a collective’s members have an autonomy-based interest in sustaining their shared cultural or political projects (e.g. Moore 2015; Stilz 2019; see also Miller 1995 and 2020). I shall try to show that the moral weight of that individual interest decreases with a member’s age, all else being equal. That opens the door for age-weighting of votes. A note on delimitation: Some influential normative analyses of age-weighting of votes are output-oriented: they assume that we already know what social justice requires, and then focus on how we should design our institutions in order to realize socially just policies (e.g. Van Parijs 1998). I shall instead focus on the input-side of political decision-making, and ask what procedure-oriented reasons we have for age-weighting. There are two assets of that delimitation. First, the reasons we shall consider in favor of age-weighting might (hopefully) appeal to people who affirm different conceptions of social justice. Second, our analysis will not be empirically contingent to the same extent as output-oriented analyses, which invariably rely upon assumptions about age-differentiated patterns of voting motives (e.g. whether younger voters tend to vote greener). This delimitation is not to suggest of course that outcomes are irrelevant. The restricted aim of the present analysis is thus to identify some pro tanto reasons that may hopefully inform a broader assessment of whether age-weighting of votes is overall desirable. After discussing some objections to my analysis, including the view that weighted voting violates the idea of democratic equality (as roughly expressed in the ‘one person, one vote’ slogan), the paper ends with a concrete policy proposal. The proposal is to weight votes according to an inverted S-curve function, where the Y-axis refers to the weight of a person’s vote (from 0 to 1), and the X-axis refers to the number of years elapsed after a person has reached the age of maturity/enfranchisement. The inverted S-curve might account for several presumably common intuitions about the standard case: first, the young has more at stake than the old; second, the stakes remain quite high also for a mid-life adult; third, the stakes drop significantly when a person becomes very old, although they do not reach zero until the person’s death.