Should Children Get a Vote? 1
By Jamie Bronstein
P1. All subjects and citizens living in a democracy have interests.
P2. If subjects and citizens living in a democracy have interests, then justice requires that those
interests be advocated.
C1. Therefore, justice requires that those interests be advocated.
P3. Either citizens and subjects should advocate their interests directly, by voting, or their
interests ought to be advocated indirectly, by virtual representation.
P4. Some citizens and subjects are not allowed to vote.
C2. Therefore, virtual representation ought to be allowed.
What is virtual representation?
The idea of “virtual representation” of interests dates back to the 18th century. Under the
theory of British parliamentary representation prevalent at that time, Members of Parliament
were understood to “virtually represent” the entire Empire, rather than being bound to any
particular constituency. This was an important underpinning of the English parliamentary
system, since the constituencies had been formulated hundreds of years earlier, before the birth
of many of England’s industrial cities. So while cities like Liverpool and Manchester remained
1 This paper, a work in progress, had its start in a series of conversations with Mark
Walker, and I want to acknowledge his important contributions. Any deficiencies which the
ideas collected as they were fleshed out, are mine.
unrepresented, there were other notorious “pocket boroughs” like Old Sarum, where the number
of voters could be counted on one hand, or where the Parliamentary seat was in the control of the
family that owned the land.. The number of people barred from voting was much greater than the
number of people who were enfranchised. Voter qualifications varied by constituency, but for
the most part the vote was confined to men over 21 years of age who owned a certain amount of
property. The notion of virtual representation was undergirded by the idea that representatives
had to act upon their consciences, based on what they thought was in the best interest of the
country. They were not to be bound by any particular instructions from their constituencies.
As we know from American history, virtual representation famously failed when it came
to representing Britain’s North American colonies, leading to the cry of “no taxation without
representation,” and, eventually, the secession of those colonies from the Empire. Why was
virtual representation insufficient? As Edmund Burke explained, there was no community of
interest, no sympathy, between most members of Parliament and the American colonies. MPs
literally could not envision living on the imperial frontier, and so their idea of best interests was
very limited.
Over time, both in Britain and the United States, we have recognized the importance of
self-advocacy in a democracy by expanding the franchise. In the United States, the national
franchise was expanded first to white men without property (1820s), then to African-American
men (1870), then to women (1920), and finally to young people between the ages of 18 and 21
(1971) . With the expansion of the franchise to enable these groups to represent their own
interests, the relationship of each senator and representative to the good of the “whole,” and
particularly to the good of those who remained unrepresented, became more and more
attenuated. Now, each person was expected to vote on the basis of his or her own personal
interest, and each representative to carry with him or her the wishes of his or her specific
constituency. Although due to the traditional 18th-century animosity between England and
France no Parliamentarian worth his salt would have acknowledged the connection, virtual
representation was intended to represent what Rousseau called the General Will, rather than the
Aggregate Will.
Today, our country continues to exclude some citizens (born or naturalized in the United
States and subject to its laws) and subjects (resident in the United States and subject to its laws)
from voting, without even the benefit of a theory of virtual representation. A list of subjects with
interests who are not allowed to advocate those interests by voting might include legal resident
aliens, undocumented aliens, felons, the mentally ill, the mentally handicapped, and, if you’re
Peter Singer, higher order non-human primates. But the largest group of the disenfranchised is
one to which most American adults belonged at one time or another: US citizens under the age of
18. Why do we not allow members of these groups to vote? Some are excluded because we have
defined voting as a right of citizenship. Others are excluded because they are deemed to have
forfeited full citizenship by breaking the law. But the largest group, children, are excluded
because they are deemed solely on the basis of their age, to be not-rational.2
The exclusion of citizens from political participation on the basis of an assumption of
non-rationality should offend our conception of justice. As Francis Schrag pointed out in the
1970s, it has long been acknowledged by theorists of democracy that the “equality” of those
2 Although Elaine Spitz argues that additional reasons are that children lack life
experience and that they have nothing material directly to lose by choosing bad policies, the
same might be said of other groups that we do not exclude from the franchise: agoraphobics and
poor people, for example. See Elaine Spitz, “On ‘The Child’s Status in the Democratic State,’”
Political Theory vol. 4 no. 3 (1976): 372-374. And, has Mark Walker has pointed out, children
currently experiencing entitlements directly, or wealth through their parents, do have much to
lose directly.
participating in a modern democratic polity is not descriptive. It is demonstrably true that some
people are more educated about political issues than others, and that some have more time to
engage in political thought than others. Rather, the idea of equality is normative. We can’t
assume that there is some “common good” of the state that precedes the individual interests of
the citizens comprised by the state, but can only discern what those interests are by a process of
participation.3 Because we enfranchise almost all adult citizens with no reference to their
competence at understanding political issues or even understanding which political party is likely
to serve their own interests, the exclusion of other groups on must be strictly scrutinized.4
Do children have unique interests? Obviously, they do. Their interests include not just the
obvious ones, like access to free and fair education, a safe food and water supply, and a clean
environment, but also a set of future-oriented policies that may conflict with the real-time
interests of others. If, for example, children’s health care and the health-care of elderly adults are
pitted against each other, we can expect legislators to be more responsive to the group that is able
to represent its own interests. The same could be said of national indebtedness, which is seen as a
tradeoff between current welfare and future sacrifice.5 Karl Hinrichs has warned that certain
European countries are heading towards situations of ethnic genrontocracy; new immigrant
groups who are unrepresented among the older age cohors, but who have many children under
the age of 18, have fewer votes as a group than do native-born elderly voters. One result of this
3 Francis Schrag, “The Child’s Status in the Democratic State,” Political Theory vol. 3
no. 4 (1975): 441-457.
4 Howard Cohen, “On the Exchange between Schrag and Cohen, ‘The Child’s Status in
the Democratic State,” Political Theory vol. 6 no. 2 (1978): 249-251.
5 Philippe van Parijs demonstrates the voter bias of the elderly in “The
Disenfranchisement of the Elderly, and Others Attempts to Secure Intergenerational Justice,”
Philosophy and Public Affairs vol. 27 no. 4 (1999): 292-333.
has been that in France, the financial welfare of the aged has been increasing, while that of
children has been decreasing.6
Should children be excluded from having their interests represented, on the basis of
alleged non-rationality? If we look back through history, we can see that many groups that are
currently allowed to vote were partitioned off and designated as “non-rational” or otherwise unfit
for inclusion in the community of political participants. Many of these groups were explicitly
characterized as suffering from the same kinds of defects that children are characterized as
suffering from: unfamiliarity with politics, the inability to reason logically, being ruled by their
emotions. Carl Cohen made this connection explicit:
The many, stupid, foolish citizens must have their right to vote protected the rational
capacity presupposed by participation is theirs. The case of children is very different.
Some youngsters . . . exhibit remarkable maturity at 15, or 12, or 10 years of age. But
human maturation is slow; the young do not have, in the early stages of their growth, the
rational capacity that democracy proposes . . . the age criterion aims simply to delay the
full membership of those who, by their nature, cannot be expected to deal satisfactorily
with questions of the kind facing voters in a democracy.7
The nature of rationality has not changed over time; what has changed is our epistemic
bias about rationality. It used to be believed that rationality could not come in a package that was
black or female; now it is assumed that rationality cannot come in a form that is less than 18
years of age. Surely, there are some children, especially older teenagers, who are more rational
than some adults. This makes the exclusion of children from having their interests considered
even more egregious, because these children are both rational and full citizens and are still
deprived the opportunity of political participation. Despite this deprivation of political
participation, children are one of the most regulated groups in society, subject to laws regarding
6 Karl Hinrichs, “Faut-il accorder le droit de vote aux enfants?” Revue Philosophique du
Louvain vol. 105 no. 1 (2007): 42-76.
7 Carl Cohn, “On the Child’s Status in the Democratic State: A Response to Mr. Schrag,”
Political Theory vol. 3 no. 4 (1975): 458-463.
the ability to work, drink or drive, requirements about education and medical care, and they are
prevented by law from bringing a lawsuit on their own behalf.
I have argued that justice requires that the interests of the non-represented be advocated.
Is there at least one way in which this might be achieved? There are several possible ideas, which
can be divided into two categories: directly representative, and “virtually representative.”8
Directly Representative
(i)
Parents could be given an extra vote for each child.
The benefit of this suggestion is that it retains the principle of “one man,
one vote,” around which our system of representation has come to
revolve.9 It would also solve the present mathematical problem that
exists: parents are expected, with their single vote, to account for both
their interests and those of their children, whereas people without
children represent only themselves.
Problem: History suggests that when people have their interests
subsumed in the votes of others, those interests are not necessarily
adequately represented. Coverture, the set of laws that outlined the
legal existence of women, was based on the doctrine that women didn’t
8 Francis Schrag proposed compentency testing for all citizens over the age of 10, but
noted that this could carry with it grave drawbacks, including the purposeful disenfranchisement
of some minority groups by the groups that designed the competency tests. His conclusion was
that the risk of keeping children disenfranchised was low compared with the risk of instituting a
competency test that would disenfranchise adults. See Schrag, p. 453.
9 Proxy votes for parents have been suggested by a number of different scholars. See van
Parijs, p. 311.
need a vote, but that they would be politically represented by their
husbands and fathers. Nonetheless, progress toward such essential
pieces of legislation as divorce laws and married women’s propertyownership was very slow, because legislation that benefited women
disadvantaged men. As Karl Hinrichs points out, it is hard to imagine a
scenario in which a parent, seeing the interest of his or her child to lie
with a different party than his own, casting his or her second vote for the
opposing party!10
Finally, The allocation of extra votes based on family size would also
potentially harm the environment by providing people with a perverse
incentive to have large families.
(ii)
Older teenagers could vote for children’s representatives of the House
of Representatives in a separate election. The voting might be phased in,
so that 13-15-year-olds get half a vote, and 16 and 17-year-olds get a
full vote. The number of representatives designated as children’s
representatives could vary with the proportion of children within that
state. As one 16-year-old who wrote a piece on just this issue pointed
out, enabling older teenagers to vote would be easy to accomplish.
Voting ages are stipulated at the discretion of the states; the TwentySixth Amendment to the Constitution followed two states’ experiences
in lowering their voting ages to 18. And in order to prevent lowering the
10 Hinrichs, p. 57.
voting age to 16 or 17, a state would have to be able to demonstrate a
compelling interest in doing so. 11
Phasing in the voting process in this way could be quite beneficial, since
the constituency of teenagers would be directly represented by
legislators responsive to their needs.12
(iii)
The voting system could be rearranged around a system of “personal
representation,” whereby there are a certain number of candidates who
can run nationally for office, and each person gets one vote for one
candidate. Under such a system candidates could run specifically for the
office of children’s representatives, and teenagers of various ages could
be given partial votes. A system of personal representation would have
many additional benefits that I don’t have space to address in this paper,
including the representation of electoral minorities.13
11 Vita Wallace, “Immodest Proposals II: Give Children the Vote,” Thinking: The
Journal of Philosophy for Children vol. 10 no. 1 (1992): 46-7.
12 Schrag also suggested that teenagers could be allowed to vote in local elections before
being allowed to vote in national elections. See Schrag, p. 456. If this two-stage process were
instituted, it would mirror the way in which both British and American women gained the right
to vote. Philippe van Parijs noted that a number of different states have either proposed or
adopted a voting age under 18, including the Isle of Man, South Africa, and West Germany. See
van Parijs, pp. 302-3.
13 The idea of personal representation using a single, nationally transferable vote was
first suggested in 1857 by Thomas Hare, in The Machinery of Representation, and would later be
endorsed by John Stuart Mill, but it was defeated as a legislative proposal by those in England
who argued that it disadvantaged political majorities. See F.D. Parsons, “Ignis Fatuus v. Pons
Asinorum: William Gladstone and Proportional Representation, 1867-1885,” Parliamentary
History vol. 21 no. 3 (2002): 374-385. For a full explanation of this option, see Thomas W.
Virtually Representative
(iv)
Allow legislators with special interest in children’s issues, or the issues
of other unrepresented groups, to self-designate as official
representatives of that unrepresented group, with the responsibility to
communicate that group’s interests and to liase with and report back to
members of that group. During the period of self-designation, which
could only last two electoral cycles, this would be a “safe seat.” Karl
Hinrich has even suggested that legislators appointed, or self-appointed,
to be the guardians of the interests of children and of future generations
should be able to have a veto power over legislation that seemed to
harm those interests.14
(v)
Ostensibly, if the children’s representative did a good job, he or she
could expect to be re-elected by that portion of the electorate that had
come into full voting rights after two terms.
This would be “virtual representation” in its most perfect form: based on
that natural sympathy of interest between a representative and a chosen
constituency. In fact, history shows that this kind of representation can be quite
effective. In the 1840s, Thomas Slingsby Duncombe, the MP for Finsbury,
Pogge, “Self-Constituting Constituencies to Enhance Freedom, Equality, and Participation in
Democratic Procedures,” Theoria vol. 49 no. 99 (2002): 26-54.
14 Hinrichs, p. 69.
appointed himself the legislative representative of the unenfranchised working
people. His actions included advocating for the vote for working men; opposing
the government opening the mail of working-class political activists;
advocating for laws that equalized the power in the employer-employee
relationship; and improving the truly sordid conditions on board Britain’s
floating prison fleet. He circulated throughout the country, sharing news about
his Parlaiemntary agenda with working people, and received their petitions and
visits. He was nicknamed “the Member for all England” in virtue of his
effective representation of this nonvoting constituency, and continued to be
very effective until his death in 1861. Later, John Stuart Mill would serve a
similar function as an advocate for women’s issues in Parliament. In contrast,
the failure of current politicians to engage with issues of interest to young
people has been hypothesized to be one of the major reasons why even when
people turn 18 and gain the vote, they tend to be disconnected from politics or
fail to see the impact of policy on their lives.15
(vi)
Non-legislative option: The executive branch could create assistantsecretary-level positions to gather information on, meet with members
of, and seek to craft legislation that would benefit the interests of,
unrepresented groups. So there could be an assistant secretary for
children’s advocacy, an assistant secretary for advocacy for the
developmentally disabled, etc.
15 Amanda Clarke, “A Dialogue on Youth and Democracy,” Canadian Parliamentary
Review Summer 2010 : 25-28.
Conclusion: Expected benefits of virtual representation
Having designated legislators advocate unrepresented groups increases the likelihood that
such groups will educate themselves politically and, when they are ready, participate actively in
the political process. Voter turnout is very low compared to what it has been at other times in our
nation’s history; about half of eligible voters don’t even bother to vote in presidential elections.
The group most likely not to vote are 18-to-24-year olds, demonstrating the impact of the
absence of civic education and engagement among young people. The same is true in Canada,
where only 10 percent of eligible youth vote. A pilot program to introduce critical thinking and
mock elections in classrooms has been shown to increase civic engagement and earlier
attainment of the kind of political competence that voters are assumed by democratic theory to
possess. In a society in which children were understood to be represented, such civic education
would need to be pursued earlier and more frequently, to the benefit of all.
Of course there are possible drawbacks with any experiment at broadening the electorate,
either directly or through virtual representation. Schrag, for example, warned that lowering the
voting age too far would make the balance between rights and duties lopsided, since (for
example) minors could weigh in on foreign policy but not be compelled to fight in wars (his,
however, is also true of many members of the adult electorate, particularly in the age of the allvolunteer army). But history also shows that every attempt to broaden the scope of the electorate
has been met by the same apocalyptic warnings. If poor men are enfranchised, they will do
nothing but tax the rich! If women are enfranchised, they will forget how to care for their
families? Philippe van Parijs has pointed out that enfranchising the young may cause the old to
be less public-spirited, with a race to the bottom as everyone protects his or her own selfish
interests.
In the final analysis, however, constitutional reform can’t be justified on the basis of
consequences alone—it has to be based on a theory of justice. “One person, one vote” is the
theory toward which we have been moving, and virtual representation of the unrepresented
would be one more step in that direction.