![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
Abstract
Political philosophers have begun to debate whether the right to vote should be extended towards some or all of the third of humanity who are under 18 years old. In addition, child and youth suffrage movements are arising globally. Much uncertainty remains, however, about whether democracy can legitimately be extended beyond adulthood. This article advances this discussion by comparing children's suffrage debates today to those surrounding the global women's suffrage movements of the past century and a half. It argues that minor enfranchisement requires postmodern rather than modern conceptions of democratic inclusion and revised understandings of voting rights as such.
Keywords:
Notes on contributor
John Wall is Professor of Religion, with a joint appointment in Childhood Studies, at Rutgers University, Camden, USA. He is the author of Ethics in Light of Childhood (Georgetown, 2010) and Moral Creativity (Oxford, 2005), and co-editor of Children and Armed Conflict (Palgrave, 2011), Marriage, Health, and the Professions (Eerdmans, 2002), and Paul Ricoeur and Contemporary Moral Thought (Routledge, 2002).
Notes
1. John Maddicott, The Origins of the English Parliament, 924–1327 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
2. Charles Seymour, Electoral Reform in England and Wales (London: David & Charles Reprints, 1970).
3. Mary Jo Buhle and Paul Buhle, eds, Concise History of Woman Suffrage: Selections from the Classic Work of Stanton, Anthony, Gage, and Harper (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 96.
4. Elizabeth Cady Stanton et al., The History of Women's Suffrage (1881; reprint, Salem, NH: Ayer Publishers, 1985), vol. 3, 275.
5. Representation of the People Bill of 1867, House of Commons Debates, 20 May 1867, 821.
6. Ibid., 817.
7. Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, revised ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 141.
8. Representation of the People Bill of 1867, 839.
9. Sophia A. Wingerden, The Women's Suffrage Movement in Britain, 1866–1928 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999), 14.
10. Stanton et al., The History of Women's Suffrage, vol. 3, 697.
11. Keyssar, The Right to Vote, 159–60.
12. Millicent Garrett Fawcett, ‘Home and Politics: An Address Delivered at Toynbee Hall and Elsewhere’, c.1888, 3.
13. Stanton et al., The History of Women's Suffrage, vol. 3, 202.
14. Keyssar, The Right to Vote, 155.
15. Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Women's Suffrage Journal, 1 April 1870, 13.
16. Women's Disabilities Bill, House of Commons Debates, 30 April 1873, 1238.
17. Stanton et al., The History of Women's Suffrage, 71.
18. Wingerden, The Women's Suffrage Movement in Britain, 1866–1928, 73–85.
19. Keyssar, The Right to Vote, 176.
20. E.S. Nichols, ed., Proceedings and Debates of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Ohio, 1913, vol. 2 (Columbus, OH: F.J. Heer Printing Co., 1913), 600–39, 604–7.
21. Lucia Zedner, Women, Crime and Custody in Victorian England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 2.
22. UNICEF, Convention on the Rights of the Child. http://www.unicef.org/crc/ (accessed 10 September 2013).
23. John Wall and Anandini Dar, ‘Children's Political Representation: The Right to Make a Difference’, International Journal of Children's Rights 19, no. 4 (2011): 595–612, 598.
24. Maree Brown and Jaleh McCormack, ‘Placing Children on the Political Agenda: New Zealand's Agenda for Children’, in The Politics of Childhood: International Perspectives, Contemporary Developments, ed. Jim Goddard, Sally McNamee, Adrian James and Allison James (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 185–207.
25. Lucy Jamieson and Wanjiru Mukoma, ‘Dikwankwetla – Children in Action: Children's Participation in the Law Reform Process in South Africa’, in A Handbook of Children and Young People's Participation, ed. Barry Percy-Smith and Nigel Thomas (New York: Routledge, 2010), 73–82.
26. Jen Williams and Rhian Croke, ‘Institutional Support for the UNCRC's “Citizen Child”’, in Children and Citizenship, ed. Antonella Invernizzi and Jane Williams (Los Angeles: Sage, 2008), 184–7.
27. Stefanie Conrad, ‘Children as Active Citizens: Addressing Discrimination against Children's Engagement in Political and Civil Society Processes’ (Plan International, 2009). http://www.plan-international.org.uk; Sara L. Austin, ‘Children's Participation in Citizenship and Governance’, in A Handbook of Children and Young People's Participation, ed. Barry Percy-Smith and Nigel Thomas (New York: Routledge, 2010), 245–53; Children's United Parliament of the World (2013). http://www.childrensstate.net; Stephanie McCrummen, ‘“Children's Parliament” Sets High Bar in Congo: Youthful Body in a Beacon of Justice’, The Washington Post, 11 August 2007; Neighborhood Community Network (2013). http://www.neighborhoodparliament.org; Jayashri Sarkar and Blanka Mendoza, ‘Bolivia's Children's Parliament: Bringing Participation to the National Stage’, Children, Youth and Environments 15, no. 2 (2005): 227–44; Lalitha Sridhar, ‘Bal Sansads: Members of Parliament at 11′, Infochange: News and Analysis of Social Justice and Development Issues in India (May 2004). infochangeindia.org/20040508228/Children/Features/Bal-Sansads-Members-of-Parliament-at-11.html; Emma Williams, Children's Participation and Policy Change in South Asia (London, UK: Save the Children, Childhood Poverty Research and Policy Center (CHIP), 2004). http://www.childhoodpoverty.org/index.php/action=documentfeed/doctype=pdf/id=86.
28. Alan Turkie, ‘More than Crumbs from the Table: A Critique of Youth Parliaments as Models of Representation for Marginalised Young People’, in A Handbook of Children and Young People's Participation, ed. Barry Percy-Smith and Nigel Thomas (New York: Routledge, 2010), 262–9; Michael Wyness, ‘Regulating Participation: The Possibilities and Limits of Children and Young People's Councils’, Journal of Social Sciences 9 (2005): 7–18.
29. Mary John, Children's Rights and Power: Charging Up for a New Century (London: Jessica Kingsley, 2003), 235–9; Ahsa Bajpai, Child Rights in India: Law, Policy, and Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 469.
30. Yves Cabannes, ‘Children and Young People Build a Participatory Democracy in Latin American Cities’, Children, Youth and Environments 15, no. 2 (2005): 185–210.
31. Greg Hurst, ‘Ministers Contemplate Lowering the Voting Age to 16’, The Times, 14 February 2003.
32. Bobby Caina Calvan, ‘Californians Consider Granting 14-Year-Olds the Right to Vote’, Boston Globe, 25 April 2004.
33. Philip Cowley and David Denver, ‘Votes at 16? The Case Against’, Representation 41, no. 1 (2004): 57–62; Alex Folkes, ‘The Case for Votes at 16’, Representation 41, no. 1 (2004): 52–56.
34. BBC News, 14 September 2013. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-24229366 (accessed 15 September 2013).
35. Harry De Quetteville, ‘Germany Plans to Give Vote to Babies’, Daily Telegraph, 9 July 2008; KRÄTZÄ (die Kinderrächtszänker) (2013). http://www.kraetzae.de.
36. John Holt, Escape from Childhood (New York: Penguin, 1975), 155–6.
37. Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 120.
38. Bob Franklin, ‘Children's Political Rights’, in The Rights of Children, ed. Bob Franklin (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 24–53, 30–1.
39. Tak Wing Chan and Matthew Clayton, ‘Should the Voting Age be Lowered to Sixteen? Normative and Empirical Considerations’, Political Studies 54 (2006): 533–58, 542.
40. Cowley and Denver, ‘Votes at 16? The Case Against’, 60.
41. Geoffrey Scarre, ‘Children and Paternalism’, Philosophy 55, 211 (1980): 117–24, 123.
42. John Locke, ‘Two Treatises of Government’, in The Works of John Locke, Vol. V (London: W Sharpe and Son, 1823), 130.
43. Franklin, ‘Children's Political Rights’, 34.
44. Francis Schrag, ‘Children and Democracy: Theory and Policy’, Politics, Philosophy and Economics 3, no. 3 (2004): 365–79, 371.
45. David Archard, Children, Family and the State (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 53.
46. Jürgen Habermas, Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics, trans. C.P. Cronin (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1993), 64.
47. Cowley and Denver, ‘Votes at 16? The Case Against’, 61.
48. Benjamin R. Barber, ‘The Discourse of Civility’, in Citizen Competence and Democratic Institutions, ed. Stephen L. Ekin and Karol E. Soltan (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 1999), 39–47, 42–3.
49. Immanuel Kant, The Science of Right, trans. W. Hastie (Clifton, NJ: A. M. Kelley, 1974), paras 28–9.
50. Tom Cockburn, ‘Children as Participative Citizens: A Radical Pluralist Case for “Child-Friendly” Public Communication,’ Journal of Social Sciences, no. 9 (2005): 19–29, 27.
51. Schrag, ‘Children and Democracy’, 374–5.
52. Ruth Lister, ‘Citizenship: Towards a Feminist Synthesis’, Feminist Review 57 (1997): 28–48, 39. See also Ruth Lister, ‘Why Citizenship: Where, When and How Children?’, Theoretical Inquiries in Law 8, no. 2 (2007): 693–718.
53. Mehmoona Moosa-Mitha, ‘A Difference-Centred Alternative to Theorization of Children's Citizenship Rights’, Citizenship Studies 9, no. 4 (2005): 369–88, 375.
54. Martin Guggenheim, What's Wrong with Children's Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 266.
55. Ibid., 266.
56. Virginia Murphy-Berman, Helen L. Levesque and John J. Berman, ‘U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child: A Cross-Cultural View’, American Psychologist 51, no. 12 (1996): 1257–61, 1259.
57. Sarah White, ‘Children's Rights and the Imagination of Community in Bangladesh’, Childhood: A Journal of Global Child Research 14, no. 4 (2007): 505–20, 510.
58. John Wall, ‘Can Democracy Represent Children? Toward a Politics of Difference’, Childhood: A Journal of Global Child Research 19, no. 1 (2012): 86–100.
59. John Wall, Ethics in Light of Childhood (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2010).
60. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, 2nd ed. (New York: Verso, 2001).
61. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 341 and 336.
62. Richard Kearney, Strangers, Gods, and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness (New York: Routledge, 2003), 81 and 232.
63. Arjun Appadurai, The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition (London: Verso, 2013), 295.
64. Holt, Escape from Childhood, 155–71.
65. Franklin, ‘Children's Political Rights’, 45.
66. Francis Schrag, ‘The Child's Status in the Democratic State’, Political Theory 3, no. 4 (1975): 441–57, 452.
67. CRIN (Children's Rights Information Network), ‘Germany: Children Should Have the Right to Vote, Say Parliamentarians’ (2008). http://www.crin.org/resources/infoDetail.asp?ID=17831&flag=news; De Quetteville, ‘Germany Plans to Give Vote to Babies’; Goethe Institute, ‘The Right to Vote from Birth On?’ (2010). http://www.goethe.de/ges/pok/sup/en5570225.htm.