Too old to vote? A democratic analysis of age-weighted voting
| Published date | 01 October 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14748851211062604 |
| Author | Andrei Poama,Alexandru Volacu |
| Date | 01 October 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Too old to vote?
A democratic analysis of
age-weighted voting
Andrei Poama
Leiden University, Netherlands
Alexandru Volacu
University of Bucharest, Romania
Abstract
Are there any prima facie reasons that democracies might have for disenfranchising
older citizens? This question reflects increasingly salient, but often incompletely theo-
rized complaints that members of democratic publics advance about older citizens’
electoral influence. Rather than rejecting these complaints out of hand, we explore
whether, suitably reconstructed, they withstand democratic scrutiny. More specifically,
we examine whether the account of political equality that seems to most fittingly cap-
ture the logic of these complaints –namely, equal opportunity of political influence over
electoral outcomes –can justify disenfranchising older citizens. We conclude that equal
opportunity of influence cannot ground a blanket disenfranchisement of older people
and that, taken in conjunction with other general considerations that apply to all
sound electoral policies, partial disenfranchisement proposals (i.e. proposals for redu-
cing the electoral influence of older citizens via age-weighted voting) are both quasi-
inapplicable and practically unrobust across a relevant range of political contexts.
Keywords
Political influence, equality of influence, voting rights, age-weighted voting, political
equality
Ought older citizens be deprived of their right to vote? Some think so. Consider the fol-
lowing complaints:
1. In a 2019 op-ed for the New York Times, Astra Taylor contends that “Older people
today hold disproportionate power because they have the numbers and the means to
Corresponding author:
Andrei Poama, Leiden University.
Email: a.poama@fgga.leidenuniv.nl
Article
European Journal of Political Theory
2023, Vol. 22(4) 565–586
© The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/14748851211062604
journals.sagepub.com/home/ept
do so. People 65 and older, for example, are more than three times as likely to make
political donations as those under 30. As a result, their voices, amplified by money,
carry farther politically than those of the young and impecunious. There are a lot of
voices in their chorus. The American electorate is the oldest it’s been since at least
1970 and is graying at a rapid clip, with the well-off living longer than ever before.”
1
2. In a 2017 letter to The Independent, Geoffrey Downs writes that “It’s all very well
relatively well-off over-65 s being prepared to accept Brexit economic damage –
they won’t live with the consequences for as long as younger people, or feel them
as much. Clearly, they skewed the Brexit referendum result. The answer is simple:
give the vote to people at 16 for both elections and referenda (…) and take it
away from them at retirement age.”
2
These complaints point to an argument that supporters of representative democracies
might consider endorsing. The argument is that older citizens can exert an unjustifiably
disproportionate amount of electoral influence, as compared to less old (albeit not neces-
sarily young) citizens. Granting older citizens equal voting rights might thus fail to satisfy
one of the central standards of democracy –namely, political equality. This may strike us
as counterintuitive, since political equality normally calls for equal voting rights. But, at
least under one interpretation that we examine below, political equality does not seem to
always hold among those who, when granted equal voting rights, can gain unjustifiably
unequal political sway.
3
In what follows, we conditionally take equal opportunity of political influence as one
plausible view about political equality. As discussed below, this is not to deny that there
are other, perhaps ultimately sounder strategies for formulating the demands of political
equality. Rather, our aim is to focus on an understanding of political equality that most
fittingly and charitably captures the logic of the complaints raised against the dispropor-
tionate electoral influence of older citizens, and thus offers their strongest principled
defense.
To anticipate, our conclusion is that radical proposals for a blanket disenfranchisement
of older citizens fail for equal influence reasons alone, and that more modest proposals for
partially disenfranchising older citizens –i.e., for reducing their electoral weight –fail for
equal influence reasons in conjunction with other general considerations that apply to all
electoral policies, irrespective of their normative premises. In particular, we show that
there are significant epistemic limitations to deciding the size of age-relative electoral
weights and that equal influence might, under some realistic circumstances, require
increasing older citizens’voting weight, and so cannot robustly vindicate disenfranchise-
ment proposals. Given these basic decidability and robustness concerns, we conclude that
the complaints introduced above fail on the best available grounds that could be offered in
their favor. This conclusion is particularly valuable, since it confronts proponents of age-
based disenfranchisement policies with both internal and normatively non-committal
reasons for discarding their own proposals. The conclusion is also valuable because it
avoids examining such proposals on the basis of alternative views about political equality
566 European Journal of Political Theory 22(4)
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