A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Votes of People with Short Life Expectancy from Being a Long-Term Burden to Their Country

Ognjen Arandjelović ()
Additional contact information
Ognjen Arandjelović: North Haugh, University of St Andrews, St Andrews KY16 9SX, UK

Social Sciences, 2023, vol. 12, issue 3, 1-8

Abstract: In response to the growing social discontent regarding what is perceived as generational injustice, due to younger generations of voters facing long-term negative consequences from issues disproportionately decided by the votes of older generations of voters, there have been suggestions to introduce an upper age voting threshold. These have been all but universally dismissed as offensive and contrary to basic democratic values. In the present article, I show that the idea is in fact entirely consonant with present-day democratic practices and far from without a precedent. Hence, I describe how the aforementioned generational injustice can be rectified using a simple vote-weighting scheme which is easy to implement and interpret. Lastly, I discuss the societal effects that this alteration of the voting system would have on the distribution of the origins of political power.

Keywords: democracy; voting; ballot; elections; age; ageism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A B N P Y80 Z00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/12/3/173/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/12/3/173/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jscscx:v:12:y:2023:i:3:p:173-:d:1096748

Access Statistics for this article

Social Sciences is currently edited by Ms. Yvonne Chu

More articles in Social Sciences from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().