Joshua Kleinfeld and Stephen Sachs make a significant contribution to the literature on children's disenfranchisement by describing and defending parental proxy voting: empowering parents to vote on their children's behalf. The authors' democratic critique of the status quo is particularly persuasive. Children's exclusion from the franchise indeed distorts public policies by omitting children's preferences from the set that policymakers consider. However, Kleinfeld and Sachs's proposal wouldn't do enough to correct this distortion. This is because contemporary parents diverge politically from their children, holding, on average, substantially more conservative views. The proxy votes that parents cast for their children would thus often conflict with the children's actual desires. Fortunately, there's an alternative policy that would fix more of the bias caused by disenfranchising children: young adult proxy voting. Under this approach, children's votes would be allocated to not their parents but rather young adults -- the cohort of adults closest in age to children. Young adults, unlike parents, are highly politically similar to children. At present, for example, both young adults and children are quite liberal. So, to update Kleinfeld and Sachs's thesis, if we want children "to be adequately represented at the polls, we should give [young adults] the vote."

Many of America's most significant policy problems, from failing schools to the aftershocks of COVID shutdowns to national debt to climate change, share a common factor: the weak political power of children. Children are 23% of all citizens; they have distinct interests; and they already count for electoral districting. But because they lack the maturity to vote for themselves, their interests don't count proportionally at the polls. The result is policy that observably disserves children's interests and violates a deep principle of democratic fairness: that citizens, through voting, can make political power respond to their interests.

Yet there's a fix. We should entrust children's interests in the voting booth to the same people we entrust with those interests everywhere else: their parents. Voting parents should be able to cast proxy ballots on behalf of their minor children. So should the court appointed guardians of those who can't vote due to mental incapacity. This proposal would be pragmatically feasible, constitutionally permissible, and breathtakingly significant: perhaps no single intervention would, at a stroke, more profoundly alter the incentives of American parties and politicians. And, crucially, it would be entirely a matter of state law. Giving parents the vote is a reform that any state can adopt, both for its own elections and for its representation in Congress and the Electoral College.

Rising life expectancies and low birth rates across the Western world have heralded a profound change in the way representative democracy operates. Whereas representative democracy was politics for the young made by the old in the past, it is turning into politics for the old made by the old in the 21st century. Following Yosuke Buchmeier and Gabriele Vogt's recent reflection on Japan's status as the democracy with the oldest electorate, this article considers the case of Germany's aging electoral democracy, using the 2021 federal election as its empirical foundation. Employing what Ian Shapiro labels a problematizing redescription, the paper demonstrates that a recharacterization of gerontocratic rule as political adultism better explains the election outcome than a characterization of gerontocratic rule as such. In doing so, it draws up an original conception of political adultism as the socially-accepted interpersonal, structural, and institutional discrimination of young and younger people in politics and distinguishes between two temporal phases as disenfranchised and enfranchised political adultism. The two-stage idea of political adultism gives voice to the structural injustice toward young people as political beings and facilitates a critical reflection on whether the policy of lowering the voting age to 16 would really be as desirable as many of its proponents believe it is. The unique contribution of this article is the formulation of a new social structure that diagnoses a distinctive experiential bias in democratic politics at a time in which the relationship between demography and democracy is coming to a head.

In this groundbreaking Research Handbook on the Sociology of Youth, researchers from the Global North and South examine the social, political, cultural and ecological processes that inform what it means to be young. It explores the diversity of youth experiences and ways young people live their lives, responding to and actively working to overcome inequality, adversity and planetary crises.

"People have the right to vote based not on cognitive capacity but on political interests, which everyone has. The right to vote is therefore universal and inviolable. No one should be banned from voting based on presumed incapacity -- yet youths and certain disabled people are. In fact, youths and disabled people are politically disenfranchised on the same basis: a perceived lack of mental capacity."

Over the past century and a half, the right to vote has been expanded worldwide to those with low incomes, minoritised ethnic groups, women, the colonised, and young adults, but not yet to all of those younger than 18 years, who make up a third of humanity. Despite young people's obvious capacities for climate activism, anti-racism protest, gun rights opposition, labour union organisation, gender fluidity action, and much else in political life, suffrage continues to be defined by a hard line of age that leaves children's perspectives excluded. Securing children's enfranchisement faces opposition fuelled by the misconception that adults' representation of children is sufficient to secure children's wellbeing. This view is counter to the acknowledgment codified in the Convention on the Rights of the Child that children are individuals with rights to freedom of expression. The issue of children's suffrage is important not only for children but also for the wider population, including paediatricians and others working with and advocating for infants, children, and young people.

"For the philosopher Mich Ciurria, not letting children vote is a form of discrimination. She demands voting rights from birth."

Drawing on the latest research on the value of early intervention, investment, and empowerment, the book makes the urgent case for putting children first---in our budgets and policies, in how we develop products and enact laws, and in our families and communities. Chapter 5 is focused on youth enfranchisement.

This edited volume offers a critical, thorough, and interdisciplinary examination of arguments for eliminating the minimum democratic voting age. As children and youth increasingly assert their political voices on issues such as climate change, gun legislation, Black Lives Matter, and education reform, calls for youth enfranchisement merit further academic conversation. Leading scholars in childhood studies, political science, philosophy, history, law, medicine, and economics come together in this collection to explore the diverse assumptions behind excluding children from voting rights and why these are open to question. While arriving at different and sometimes competing conclusions, each chapter deconstructs the idea of voting as necessarily tied to age while reconstructing a more democratic imagination able to enfranchise the third of humanity made up by children and youth. Thus, this book defines and establishes a new field of academic study and public debate around children's suffrage.

Children today grow up in an increasingly volatile, complex and uncertain world. Theirs is a generation disempowered from steering their lives while society's systems are failing to provide the support they need. Yet, a country only prospers when its children -- from all walks of life -- thrive, meaning that the United Kingdom now faces some consequential choices. Raising the Nation builds a compelling case showing why we must nurture smart, strong and kind children to one day inherit the stewardship of society. Setting out big public policy ideas, enhanced by contributions from academic and campaigning experts, as well as those with lived experience, including London Mayor Sadiq Khan, singer and activist Charlotte Church, and ex-prime minister of Denmark and former CEO of Save the Children International Helle Thorning-Schmidt, this book is a manifesto to deliver our brightest possible future. Reframing political success, it shows why we must prioritise child-centred policies to ensure the future strength of our communities, environment and economy.

This article argues that US constitutional law supports the right to vote of children regardless of age. First, it places US law in the context of the legal, philosophical, and social scientific discussion of the issue and recent children's suffrage movements, which suggest that barring the right to vote according to age neglects children's democratic interests, harms societies, and is discriminatory. Second, it considers the further context of US obligations under international law, especially the UDHR, ICCPR, and CRC, in which children's voting is arguably implied as a universal, equal, and fundamental human right. Finally, it considers US constitutional law itself and shows why ageless voting is an issue of the fundamental interests of children as a suspect class in need of special protection against voting discrimination.

Although universal suffrage is a broad franchise model, it allows for exclusions provided they are robustly justified. In practice, therefore, suffrage is never universal. Every modern democracy operates with its own exclusion principles, but they are all bounded by some sort of age exclusion screening for competence. However, there is another way to conceptualise universal suffrage -- a conceptualisation that finds credence in existing international treaties, and which better fulfil democracies governing promise of political equality. In this model, inclusivity and universalism remain the default, and franchise exclusions are subjected to more rigorous testing. To demonstrate the potential of this framework, I apply it to questions of children's suffrage, arguing that the theoretical grounds for excluding children are insufficient to overturn the default principles of universalism and inclusion.

"For a number of years, I have been making the case -- in print and in public forums -- for the enfranchisement of school-age children. Though there is growing academic interest in this subject, it remains very much a minority -- even a quixotic -- cause in contemporary politics. Whenever and wherever I have suggested lowering the voting age to six-years-old, I have been struck by the consistent response I get. Most people are instinctively against it, many of them excessively so. However, when there is a chance to discuss children's enfranchisement in more detail, most of those objections fall away. The case is generally accepted when it can be fully put and genuinely heard. Yet that doesn't make much difference to whether people care about it. Once they stop thinking it's a terrible idea, they tend to think it's a trivial one."

At the latest since the adoption of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989, children worldwide have been regarded as persons with their own special rights. These include rights that are intended to protect them and influence decisions that affect them. But how far these so-called participation rights go and whether they also include political rights is disputed. They oppose social structures that nail children down to a subordinate position, which today is subsumed under the term adultism, the meaning of which is explained at the beginning of the chapter. In this chapter it is discussed, especially with regard to children of the Global South, how far political rights, especially the right of children to vote, can contribute to counteracting adultism as a form of the colonization of children. This question is discussed not only in relation to children living today, but also in relation to future generations and intergenerational justice.

Recent years saw significant developments concerning the role of children in the political context. Yet, children today remain excluded from meaningful political influence, and children's enfranchisement stands as a main point of contention. The article posits the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) as a decisive legal and theoretical basis for conceptualising children's political rights, political participation and voting. It explores key CRC provisions that relate to children in the political context and analyses the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child's (CRC Committee) work to map what exists and what remains missing and under-developed in this discussion. Specifically, the article elaborates on the right to be heard, revealing the CRC Committee's evolutive interpretive approach concerning its implementation in the political context. The article also focuses on children's enfranchisement, exploring the CRC's potential to advocate for lowering the voting age from a child rights-based perspective.

This Essay argues that the widespread neglect of age discrimination against children is deeply problematic because the issue is not just occasional but systemic. It does so by first outlining a critical concept of adultism, that is, the historically normative marginalization of children by age. It then applies this concept to understanding the social and legal issues surrounding a key question in age discrimination, namely children's lack of the democratic right to vote. These explorations are undertaken under the broad rubric of childism, a term analogous to feminism, antiracism, and decolonialism that deconstructs children's historical disempowerment by adultism to help reconstruct more just and age-inclusive societies. By showing how age discrimination against children is systemic, this Essay aims to make the case for a broad, normative adultist analysis of policy and law.

As we approach the 100th anniversary of children's rights in 2024, it is easy to marvel at the apparent strides that have been made this past century in recognizing children as their own persons nearly fully endowed with all the same human rights as adults, as well as additional rights based on their unique status as children. Many of these rights are exercised based upon an individual child's "evolving capacity," which, unfortunately, has been used to disenfranchise en masse approximately one third of the world's population from exercising their full political power based not on an individual child's capacity to exercise her enfranchisement rights, but rather simple chronological age.

Children are treated differently from adults in almost every aspect of their lives. This is sometimes necessary (e.g., for their survival) or desirable (e.g., for their development). However, so widespread is the practice of treating them differently based on their age that it appears to be implemented without the need to justify the differential treatment. Of particular concern, in this respect, is the differential treatment encountered by children in the realm of political participation. Not only are they the sole social group systematically excluded from formally exercising core political entitlements (e.g., the right to vote, or to run for office), but, moreover, their participation as political actors in informal spheres, their freedoms, and the spaces available for them to associate and express their political claims are also highly restricted. Here, we focus on the potential discrimination of children when attempting to exercise their right to freedom of association and peaceful assembly (FAPA). We wish to draw attention to the potential injustice of children facing unjustified differential treatment in the exercise of one of the very rights needed for them to argue against discrimination in the first place.

The purposes of this paper are to explore in a comparative manner how discrimination is built into the international framework of children's rights and examine consequences of these problems for children in vulnerable situations, people human rights are supposed to protect.

A significant percentage of the population of the United States, or any other country, lives without voting rights, is prohibited from holding public office, has restricted access to employment opportunities, and is subjected to greater restrictions on their participation rights such as freedom of expression, association, and assembly. Children (individuals under eighteen years of age) constitute more than twenty percent of the U.S. population. In other countries, they represent close to half the population. If this were another group, there would likely be uproar and accusations of discrimination. But because the group is children, such differential treatment is rarely questioned.

Discrimination on the basis of chronological age (in short: age discrimination) is an under-researched dimension of human rights discrimination law. In what follows, I will explore some of the conceptual challenges that age discrimination may pose. My background is in children's rights law and human rights law. I approach children's rights as the human rights of children, and children's rights law therefore as part and parcel of human rights law. Hence, my point of departure is that the approach to age discrimination in children's rights law should be aligned as much as possible with the approach taken to (age) discrimination more generally in human rights law. This means that there is no absolute prohibition of differential treatment on grounds of age: differential treatment is permissible if a reasonable and objective justification can be offered. Such a justification requires a legitimate aim and proportionality between the differentiation and the aim pursued.

International and national laws rarely refer explicitly to age discrimination, and even when they do, they typically focus on age discrimination against the elderly, not the young. Even the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), one of whose foundational principles in article 2 is prohibition against discrimination, refers to a long list of factors such as race, ethnicity, sex, and disability, but not age, except potentially under "other status."[1] This essay takes up two lines of thought stemming from this situation. First, it explores what it means for children and young people to be discriminated against as children by a legally normative adultism. And second, it tests this problem against the issue of children's right to vote, that is, their fundamental right to participate in democratically determining rights. I argue that discrimination against children needs to be met with a systemically childist critique that can illuminate societal adultism and reimagine rights, such as the right to vote, beyond a regime of biases around age.

This paper places itself at the intersection between the literature on "Demeny voting" (the proposal of letting custodial parents exercise their children's voting rights until they come of age) and the vast literature on formal models with endogenous fertility that address the problem of fiscal redistribution between young and old cohorts in the presence of an aging population. Linking these issues to the process of economic growth through a simple overlapping generations model, we show that, even if the government is myopic, in the sense that it cares only about the current well being of the living (and voting) generations, an increase in the relative importance that it attaches to the interests of the young cohort (for instance, due the introduction of Demeny voting) leads in the long run to a higher population growth rate and raises the consumption level of each young adult, the capital stock per worker and the output per adult. We also show that in the long run such a reform raises the well being that individuals can expect at birth to achieve during their lifetime.

Children are among the few social groups that are systematically and universally disenfranchised. Although children are citizens worthy of equal moral treatment and rights, their right to vote is restricted in almost all states, and this is seen as legitimate by most democratic theories. What is particular about childhood that justifies the restriction of their right to vote? How can democratic systems legitimise the exclusion of a section of their citizenry? This article provides a critical analysis of the principles that ground child disenfranchisement, and of the allocative mechanisms proposed for restricting the right to vote. It shows that most arguments in favour of child disenfranchisement are unsatisfactory, as they are inconsistently used to target the child population (but not other groups) or are incompatible with a commitment to equality. Among the principles for child disenfranchisement, only those that appeal to political incompetence may be valid for excluding children. Regarding the allocative method of exclusion, this article shows that age thresholds cannot be justified to restrict franchise, and that, while competence tests fare better in theory, there may be issues of implementation. The article contributes by providing a clear and systematic analysis of the core arguments in favour of child disenfranchisement, and the conditions that must be met to justify such a practice.

This book argues that it is time to give children the vote. Using political theory and drawing on childhood studies, it shows why suffrage cannot legitimately be limited according to age, as well as why truly universal voting is beneficial to all and can help save today's crumbling democratic norms. It carefully responds to a wide range of objections concerning competence, knowledge, adult rights, power relations, harms to children, and much more. And it develops a detailed childist theory of voting based on holding elected representatives maximally responsive to the people's different lived experiences. The book also introduces the concept of proxy-claim voting, wherein parents or guardians exercise proxy votes for non-competent persons, both child and adult, until whatever time those persons wish to claim or reclaim the exercise of their vote for themselves. Ultimately, the book maps out a new vision of democratic voting that, by equally empowering children, is at last genuinely democratic.