Contemporary Democratic Theory and the Curious Case of Children

While the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the subsequent inclusion of children’s rights in the national constitutions of many signatory states have improved the (legal) protection of children, democratic participation largely remains an area from which children are more or less entirely excluded. Debates about lowering the voting age notwithstanding, the fact that children, despite their holding full membership of political communities, ‘do not count’ does not seem to evoke much public indignation – so much so that even within democratic theory (or within political theory overall, for that matter) the exclusion of children has not received much attention. To that effect, Robert Dahl’s observation made in ‘Democracy and its Critics’ (1989) is still very much on point: „Children […] furnish us with a clear instance of violation of the principle that a government must rest on the consent of the governed or that no one should be subject to a law not of one’s own choosing or subject to a law made by an association not of one’s own choosing. Yet this violation is nearly always either taken for granted or interpreted as not actually a violation” (Dahl 1989: 127). At the same time, the promise of the emancipatory potential thought to be baked into democratic politics by many democratic theorists also seems to have yet to fulfil itself for children. Despite the brief period in the late 20th century during which the Children’s Liberation movement (itself, incidentally carried forward not by children but adults) successfully garnered some public attention, there have been few and far instances of children organising in social and political movements to fight for participation and other rights within (Western) democracies. In my contribution, I look at this puzzling status of children within contemporary democracies through the lens of democratic theory and examine to what extent different theories of democracy (and the corresponding conceptions of democratic politics, citizenship, participation, etc.) provide explanations, and potentially even justifications for the status quo described in the above paragraph. I argue that the bulk of contemporary democratic theory indeed does not only offer few resources for ‘making sense’ of children as political subjects but, in fact, relies upon and reproduces assumptions about both children and democratic participation that inform the existing disenfranchisement of children. Turning to a critical discussion of recent proposals for including children in democratic politics, I argue that many of them remain limited by their reliance on established conceptions of democratic institutions, procedures and practices – while some do offer a glimpse of how including children might require a kind of paradigm shift in democratic theory. This leads me, finally, to turn the tables and, rather than looking at children through the lens of democratic theory, to develop an account of fundamental challenges and potential new ways of thinking about core concepts within democratic theory – specifically by way of looking at democratic theory through the lens of children.