From the archive: Votes for children! Why we should lower the voting age to six

The Audio Long Read

The Guardian

Society & Culture

4.3 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 9 April 2025

⏱️ 36 minutes

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Summary

We are raiding the Guardian Long Read archives to bring you some classic pieces from years past, with new introductions from the authors. This week, from 2021: The generational divide is deforming democracy. But there is a solution By David Runciman. Read by Andrew McGregor. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/longreadpod

Transcript

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1:13.9	Hello? Hello, my name's David Rumsman. I'm the host of the podcast, past, present, future, comes out twice a week. It's about the history of ideas, including ideas of democracy. And I'm the author of Votes for Children, Why We Should Lower the Voting Age to Six, which was published in 2021.
1:19.9	I came to this story because I was researching and writing a book about the history of democracy,
1:26.0	and I was struck by the fact that in the long history of democracy, when things are really fractious and difficult,
1:33.3	one of the ways out is to enfranchise people who don't have the vote, women, working people, ethnic minorities, religious minorities.
1:36.7	And I found myself thinking, it's a shame we got no one left to enfranchise.
1:39.6	And then I found myself thinking, of course, we do, children.
1:41.5	And I started to look into it. And the more I looked into it, the more I realized that the arguments against were very weak, and the arguments four were pretty persuasive. I don't think I've
1:49.6	ever believed that the voting age would be lower to six. There's a lot of argument about whether
1:54.8	it should be lower to 16. The new Labour government made a commitment to that, which it looks like
1:59.1	they may well renege on, I'm not even sure where we are with that. But part of the reason I wrote this piece, I believe in
2:05.3	the case, but it's also to try and highlight the fact that our democracies are really struggling.
2:11.1	Young people in particular seem to feel disenfranchised, cut off, disillusioned with democracy.
	...

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