Social Theory and Practice

published on March 15, 2023

Democracy, Epistocracy, and the Voting Age

Should voting rights be conditional upon competence? Proponents of epistocracy think so, but most political theorists dismiss this view. At the same time, the practice of disenfranchising citizens below a certain age is widely endorsed. This paper raises a challenge for proponents of the voting age. Drawing on a revised version of Estlund’s influential account, I argue that electoral inequality is justifiable only if all qualified points of view can accept that it promotes the epistemic reliability of democratic procedures. This condition rules out epistocracy, but it also implies that the voting age is harder to justify than commonly assumed.