A Vote At 16? Experiments With Lowering The Voting Age Around The World

Poland's new Marshal of the Sejm — the speaker of the lower house — and Polska 2050 party leader, Szymon Hołownia has said he intends to lower the country's voting age from 18 to 16. Calling this measure urgent, he says that it is unfair that older Poles take up a disproportionate percentage of the Polish vote, and that adding more young voters will balance the scale.

“We, the elders, by voting today, are planning your lives for much longer than for ourselves, because we will leave this world sooner, and you will continue to bear the consequences of our decisions,” he said, according to Dziennik Gazeta Polska.

With an aging population akin to much of Europe’s demography, the proportion of older Poles is only expected to rise in the upcoming years. According to recent Eurostat forecasts, Poland's population is set to shrink 23% by 2100, the seventh largest decline in the EU, with the ratio of the elderly to the working-age population is set to rise from 30% to 60% over that period.

Common adage is that young people are less likely to show up at the polls on election day. But in Poland, it is precisely young voters, and specifically young women, who are being credited with ousting the Law and Justice (PiS) party from power in the October 2023 parliamentary elections. Last fall, turnout among young people (ages 18 to 29) rose from 46.4% in 2019 to a whopping 68.8%.

Yet Hołownia has made clear that that lowering the voting age, which would require a change to the Constitution, will not be easy to implement. “I will need to find allies for this and I hope we will find them,” he said.

As Poland embarks on this quest, several countries have already already taken steps to lower the voting age, or have burgeoning movements to do so of their own.

European experiments

Under EU law, member states are free to set their own minimum voting age, including for European elections. While the most popular minimum age is 18, three countries have lowered their voting ages: Greece reduced it to 17 in 2016, Austria to 16 in 2007, and Malta to 16 in 2018.

"There is an old democratic principle which states that there should not be any taxation without representation," the National Youth Council told the Times Of Malta, adding that 16 year-olds “should also be able to vote, since they are allowed to work and liable to pay taxes."

Beyond representation, experts say that allowing younger people to participate in elections has been linked to greater political participation later in life. Tamara Ehs, of the Austrian interest group IG Democratie, told Euronews that lowering the voting age sets “a political anchor" among the young citizens.

In 2018, 79% of young Austrians reported voting compared to just 64% of Europeans as a whole.

The impacts, so far, have been notable. According to the 2018 Eurobarometer, 79% of young Austrians (15-30) reported voting in their local, regional or national elections, compared to just 64% of Europeans as a whole. Yet leading voices on the issue also contend that it will take more than lowering the voting age to mobilize young voters across Europe, should other countries take that step.

“A sustainable higher youth turnout requires providing permanent curricular and extra-curricular support measures,” Johanna Edthofer, analyst at the Austrian Society for European Politics, wrote in a study, adding that “young people in particular, frequently feel uninformed about the EU and European developments,” which may have an impact on their voting patterns.

Gender plays a role in voter turnout as well. Despite high youth turnout in Austria, young men are more likely to vote than young women.

Political disillusionment among younger voters is also consequential. In Malta's 2022 general election, 52% of voters between 16 and 35 years old said that they did not trust either of the two political leaders, according to a survey conducted by MaltaToday.

Even in Poland, where lowering the voting age is now being proposed, disillusionment with the two major parties was rampant among young voters. Most young women voted for the Polish Left (Lewica), while younger men were more inclined to vote for the radical-right Confederation (Konfederacja).

In Brazil, a history of youth activism

While the EU has only recently begun to test the impact of younger voting ages, Brazil lowered its voting age to 16 in 1988. The country has a long history of crucial youth involvement in politics, and student activist movements were critical to bringing down the 21-year military dictatorship in 1985.

In the recent past, Brazil’s youth, too, became comparatively disillusioned with politics. In 2010, for example, analysts stated that less than half of 16 to 18 year olds in the country voted, and that overall, 16- and 17-year-old voters only made up about 1 to 2% of the electorate.

In a 2020 speech, the then-Education Minister Milton Ribeiro noted this trend, referring to young people as "existential zombies" who "no longer believe in anything, from God to politics.”

One-fifth of all 16 and 17 year olds in Brazil registered to vote in the 2022 presidential election.

That same year, the COVID-19 pandemic provoked drastic changes for young people in the country. At the height of the pandemic, 30% of young people in Brazil were neither employed nor in school, and many lost their jobs due to the crisis.

Trends since then have shown a reversal in this disillusionment, and greater political energy from young people, both through activist movements and at the polls. One-fifth of all 16 and 17 year olds in Brazil registered to vote in the 2022 presidential election, offering much of their support (54%) to elect President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. The country continues to hope that younger voters will remain mobilized.

"Young people need to get involved to decide our future," Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Edson Fachin told AFP, "The worst vote is the one that doesn't get cast."