All colloquia take place via Zoom and last 90 minutes. They are every third week of the month, switching Thursdays and Saturdays, at 2:00 pm US Eastern time (remaining for 2021: Sat March 20, Thurs April 15, Sat May 22, Thurs June 17, Sat July 17, Thurs Aug 19, Sat Sept 18, Thurs Oct 14, Sat Nov 20, Thurs 16 Dec).
To attend, watch out for announcements via the listserv. All are welcome.
Age as a Yardstick for Political Citizenship
Jonathan Josefsson and Bengt Sandin, University of Linköping, Sweden
The age of 18 as the threshold for the right to vote and to stand for election, which has remained unchanged in Sweden and elsewhere since the 1970s, may today seem self-evident, but as this historical retrospective will show, upward and downward adjustments of the voting and eligibility age have been a recurrent feature of democratic development and the subject of lively political debate. Both in Sweden and internationally, the issue of voting and eligibility age has been central to questions of gender inclusivity, poor relief, pensions, marital law, and government structures, and influenced by the First World War and its resolution in Europe, ensuing social conflicts, and concerns about imminent revolution and civil war. Ages of suffrage have also been related to changing perceptions of children and ideas around age of majority, legal incapacity, military conscription, and youth politics. This talk unpacks these various historical elements of voting age debates and identifies three periods of particular importance for voting ages being lowered or raised.
November 12, 2020
Four of us presented what we are working on at the moment, including US efforts to lower the voting age, reaching out to countries' children's rights commissioners, developing an academic edited volume, and reaching out to paediatric societies worldwide. We also developed our overall plan for working groups and assigned leaders to each. See working group page here.
October 1, 2020
This meeting was devoted to developing an overall strategic campaign for the project, led by partners at Amnesty International UK. We developed the following overall objective statement: "We will work in our countries, regions, and globally to abolish a minimum voting age across the world." And we agreed to work on a hybrid model in which we continue to meet as a larger group in a monthly colloquium, but also develop smaller working groups to target specific issues and geographical regions.
August 20, 2020
A discussion of practical strategies and next steps. Numerous strategies were proposed, including the following: involving children and youth; integrating persons of color; hosting a speakers series; developing white papers, courses, videos, scholarship, and fiction; gaining funding for polls, research, legal work, and case development; creating a website and twitter account; reaching out to more children's voting organizations; and working toward an eventual summit or convention with public declaration.
July 23, 2020
The inaugural meeting of the Children's Voting Colloquium. The 13 in attendance (with 4 sending regrets) presented their ideas about children's voting. All agreed that, in one way or another, the voting age of 18 should be eliminated, so that children and youth are equally accounted for in democracies. But there were various positions on whether that involves universal/ageless voting, lowering the voting age, proxy voting, or some combination thereof.