“An idea built the wall of separation between the sexes, and an idea will crumble it to dust.” So said Sarah Moore Grimké, an American abolitionist widely considered the mother of the women’s suffrage movement.  I was reminded of her words last week in the context of the media furore which erupted when comments made by US VP candidate JD Vance in 2021 surfaced into the mainstream.

While the lion’s share of outraged column inches focused on Vance’s provocative tongue-in-cheek reference to “childless cat ladies”, it is these words that carry the greatest political significance: “Let’s give votes to all children…but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of those children.” The proposal marks a radical departure from the democratic status quo of the western world, which maintains that the ideal of universal suffrage means “universal” only amongst adults.  

There have been semi-regular debates (usually around election times) about the minimum age for enfranchisement. Some countries, such as Scotland and Austria, start at 16 for certain elections, but for the majority it is set at 18. In some of the more conservative nations it is higher: Malaysia and Taiwan start at 20 and in the UAE it is 25. But it seems that democracies are united in their exclusion of those considered “minors” from the franchise. Children are not competent to make good decisions, so the blunt logic goes, and so cannot be given the vote. This has become such embedded orthodoxy that to challenge it invariably meets with ridicule and derision. 

Vance’s comments attracted additional controversy because his words  — uttered before he knew his every remark would be crawled over by opponents determined to thwart a VP bid — were sloppy. Speaking of parents picking up additional votes is an unnecessarily contentious way of framing the debate; the implication that parents will be “double-enfranchised” creates an impression that the childless are about to be proportionally “lesser-enfranchised”. However, this isn’t about double-counting parents, but about enfranchising currently disenfranchised children.  At its core the argument is staggeringly simple: “one vote per citizen”; still contentious, perhaps, and still a novel and radical departure from current norms, but less inflammatory than the reconstructions of Vance’s presumed intent buzzing around social media last week.

Scepticism and status quo bias aside, there are in fact strong democratic, moral and societal arguments for enfranchising children, and — as per Vance’s comments — doing so by way of a proxy mechanism to be invoked where the child is too young to execute that right themselves.

The core democratic argument in favour of truly universal suffrage is that while some children will be below the age of competence to vote, they are nonetheless as much citizens as you or I. They have as much interest in shaping the society in which they will grow up, and aspire to study, work, live and pay taxes. A three year old undoubtedly lacks intellectual and legal competence to vote, but if anything, has a greater stake in the future of the society she lives in than the octogenarian next door.  

The three year old’s status as a member of the polity, a citizen with the same right as other citizens to have her interests considered equally, is in no way diminished by her lack of capacity. “But three year olds don’t pay tax” might be the lazy sceptic’s retort: mostly true in practice, but we don’t disenfranchise those who rely on benefits or otherwise don’t have taxable earnings (and, though a moot point for most, children are not exempt from paying tax on any earnings).  Children are as much the users and beneficiaries of state support as adult non-taxpayers.

Advanced legal systems such as ours are adept at providing mechanisms for those who lack legal competence to benefit from their rights and interests. There are many precedents, indeed, of parents or other carers being given proxy decision-making powers on behalf of minors in their care, and many of those situations involve decisions of far more immediate and direct impact for children than the right to participate in a political vote; for example consenting to medical treatment, or signing contractual waivers of liability (the “hold harmless” small print at the climbing wall centre, or the horse-riding school).

Children, under-represented in Western gerontocracies, have been unable to advocate for or defend their … interests

The broader moral case for enfranchising children centres on the observable reality that politicians have weak incentives for prioritising children’s interests in their policy-making: pandemic policy provides the most recent, stark examples, but really the pandemic merely exacerbated a long-standing trend in which children, under-represented in Western gerontocracies, have been unable to advocate for or defend their immediate, near or long-term interests. Instead, political decision-makers have readily subordinated children’s interests to those of (voting) adults. Think low supply of housing for new families, chronic under-investment in children’s services and maternity services, paltry increases in education budgets as compared to health services, lack of child-friendly infrastructure.

Manifestly, this has been pretty disastrous for children. It has also been disastrous for society, feeding a crippling short-termism which drives public spending and resource allocation towards issues predominantly of concern to that aging population: health, social care, pensions.

Concern for elders is a noble and essential pillar of any compassionate society, of course, but funding for public services is a finite pie and when that comes at the cost of disregard for children and children’s services, and for giving young adults confidence and encouragement to settle and start families — good schools, affordable housing, high quality childcare — we should not be surprised to find we have created a cohort of unhappy children. The UK’s kids now routinely come out near the bottom of European happiness and wellbeing league tables. It is also a recipe for there being fewer of them. UK fertility rates have been in decline since 2010 and for 2022, the last full year of published results, sunk to their lowest level since records began in 1939.  

Today’s children are tomorrow’s tax-paying adults, so by this measure rebalancing the franchise to elevate and further children’s interests stands to be as much a societal benefit as it is a moral imperative. It is notable, in fact, that so-called “Demeny voting”, whereby parents are given proxy votes for children and the blueprint for Vance’s proposal, first found prominence as a suggestion by the Hungarian economist and political scientist Paul Demeny as a measure to combat falling fertility rates in the 1980s.

Arguments against this idea tend to focus on feasibility and practicality rather than to challenge the core democratic equity of “one vote per citizen”. Most rely on an exaggerated scepticism and so do not stand up under dispassionate scrutiny: arguments which rely on the practical difficulty of enabling proxy voting overstate technical complexity whilst understating the sophistication of Western legal systems; arguments that rely on soluble complications such as divorced parents, or rare examples of carers who might be disincentivised to act in their children’s interests, seek to disregard the fact that the vast majority of parents wish to protect their children’s interest, and will routinely do so even when it is inconvenient. Those who instinctively believe that giving parents proxy votes to exercise on behalf of their children would create further inequity by somehow disenfranchising childless adults might remind themselves of the adage, “when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression”.

A more legitimate challenge might be to ask whether it is necessary to franchise children to ensure that their interests are better represented in public policy. Couldn’t we instead encourage more parents of younger children to enter politics and to become MPs? We already have a Children’s Minister so perhaps we could add a Parent’s Minister?

These are positive ideas, but they would not be sufficient. Such gestures signal an intent, but the reality, for now at least, is that politics — Westminster-centric and requiring round-the-clock energy and commitment — is a difficult arena for parents to inhabit. There are undoubtedly admirable examples who break that mould, however they are likely to have a degree of support either from spouses or third parties unavailable to many. Likewise, whilst a Minister representing parents is a noble ambition, the history of the pandemic, where even the “senior” Education Minister was unable to stem the tsunami of harm to children, teaches us to be wary of mechanisms which at best would only engender indirect representation for children. It would be almost inconceivable to suggest that any other “minority” group — representing nearly a quarter of the population — be excluded from the most fundamental of our democratic processes.

If the pandemic taught us anything it was that the fourteen million children in the UK represent a separate constituency whose needs, interests and welfare deserve far greater consideration, representation and protection. The idea that this constituency should be directly represented through direct enfranchisement is currently heretical, but from women’s suffrage to the topical example of “banning” smartphones and social media for kids, history tells us that orthodoxies are only such until the moment they are not.