The Child as Democratic Citizen

Abstract

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) justifiably emphasizes welfare over participation rights of children for two reasons. First, children are by nature an at-risk population. Second, democratic citizenship rights require a minimal bundle of cognitive and emotional capacity—which may be called “political maturity”—that children, again by nature, lack. However, the CRC goes too far in prioritizing welfare over participation, again for two reasons. First, millions of children have their basic welfare needs met, and second, participation would be useful in cultivating the very political maturity that citizens need. In this article, the author argues that participatory institutions should be designed to further the interests of children, cultivate their political maturity, and mitigate the harm that giving power to the politically immature might cause. The author discusses three institutional designs that might achieve this result (fractional voting, national electoral constituencies, and political spending accounts) and discusses how federalism might also help to implement these designs.