Should Politicians Have to Pass Competence Tests? (Your Radical Questions with David Runciman)

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1:02Hello and welcome to Your Radical Questions, where we put your questions to one of our guests. This is your chance to engage directly with the radical people we have on this podcast and ask them about their ideas for the future. I've still got David Runciman with me. David is Honorary Professor of Politics at the University of Cambridge, where he taught for many years, and he's now a full-time podcaster as the host of Past, Present, Future about the history of ideas. If you haven't heard our conversation from last Thursday, please go back and listen. It was really interesting. David set out a radical proposition that we should lower the voting age to six years old.

1:45We talked about why David thinks it's a good idea in Thursday's episode, so I'd recommend listening to that if you haven't already. But now, David is here to answer the radical questions that you've sent in. David, thank you again for joining us. You're very welcome. I'm looking forward to hearing what is coming my way. I wait with bated breath to find out if we have any six-year-olds contributing, but our first question comes from Sophie Cogan, who has sent us this voice note. Hi, I'm Sophie. I'm a massive fan of David's work and past, present, future and radicality of my favourite podcasts so I'm really looking forward to this episode.

2:23My questions are about how David's proposal deals with political knowledge and competence. Firstly, how does the proposal deal with differences in a person's understanding of politics? Could it work alongside a more epistocratic model where everyone can vote but the votes are weighted according to political competence? In that case, six wouldn't necessarily need to be the lower age limit. Anyone could vote if they could demonstrate they understood what they were voting for. Also, if the argument for lowering the voting age is based mainly on achieving better outcomes rather than the symbolic value of a vote, wouldn't that logic also support weighting votes by competence if doing so produced better outcomes?

3:05I'm looking forward to hearing David's thoughts. Thank you. I'm going to take them in reverse order, if I may. Go ahead. I don't think it is about better outcomes necessarily, partly because if you think of democracy in terms of better outcomes, you very quickly get into a line of thought that we heard a version of there, which is actually, shouldn't the people who know best have more of a say? It actually moves quite quickly towards something that sometimes gets called technocracy or and epistocratic, that's the word that was used there, which means a knowledge-based, and it is frankly elite-based version of politics.

3:47I think it's an excellent question because it does highlight precisely the way in which these ideas are in tension. But the ideas that are in tension are universal suffrage and optimal outcomes. Some people argue in the long run, universal suffrage produces optimal outcomes. I don't think many people believe you can guarantee every election. It's the best outcome because so many people were voting. And even if it's true in the long run, I think it's true in the long run, not because the people are becoming wiser and better informed, but non-democratic systems fall into the hands of charlatans, crooks and monsters.

4:26And eventually, if you get stuck with one of them, you're screwed. The great thing about democracies is we can get rid of the people who are doing it badly for us. Are there any democracies at the moment who have a more epistocratic model? Now I've learned this new fancy word, I want to use it. I mean, there is a political system that is more epistocratic than ours, and that's the Chinese political system, for sure, in that it prioritises certain kinds of expertise. The easiest way to illustrate that is that China is basically run by engineers, and Western systems are run by a mix of, well, if you take Britain, it's sort of a mix of people who have been career politicians, who've worked in think tanks, who've worked for NGOs, but there are often quite a few lawyers and so on.

5:12And an engineered society is very different from a well-meaning NGO-ish legal sort of economist society. And the argument here, as opposed to it being politicians as such, being put in place because of their competence. The suggestion is people should be able to vote by proving political competence, which would not mean universal suffrage at all, would it? Or it could mean universal suffrage, but then weighted voting according to competence. And as I suggested in our first conversation, I think the problem with that, you could have a principled objection to it. You don't like the idea that we treat some people as having more merit than others.

5:56But there's also simply a practical objection. What is the test? And you just have to think about what the test might be. Are they exams? What are they? How do we judge this thing? As I said before, I'm really attached to one person, one vote. I think it's a wonderfully simple, intuitive idea. It treats people as separate persons with their own interests, rights and opinions. And interfering with that is a risky thing to do. Thank you, Sophie. Our next question is from Luke. Hi, thanks for such stimulating ideas. I realised that a lot of this conversation is theoretical, but actually, since I was about six, I've really felt that there should be more political empowerment for children in our society.

6:43So my question is, what can we actually do about this? are there groups out there campaigning for enfranchisement for children is there something we can do to support children to gain more political power what can I as a citizen actually do yeah are you standing for office who's actually gonna do something with this idea I realize I'm sabotaging myself here when I say that I'm not not anyway not standing for office but I suspect I wouldn't win if I stood for office on this platform because people have got more important things to worry about. I'm not claiming this is the most important idea, far from it.

7:18As part of the argument about balance of risk, we're doing all sorts of crazy and weird things in our politics that we should stop doing. And this isn't going to solve that, but this isn't nearly as crazy as some of the things that we're doing. Are any of us going to be alive in 50 years time? That's a real question for our politics. So enfranchising children doesn't feel like it's as dangerous as the world that our politicians have built for us. I'm not standing on this platform. There are people who take it very seriously. They tend to come out of academic communities. This is an idea, and to be honest, this is true of many radical democratic reforms that begins in philosophy, in many cases.

7:57Some of the people I know who are interested in this come at it from a sort of philosophical, what is a human being, what is a person perspective and then it's moved through it's hard to know what to do to campaign for it practically because so much of the focus is on lowering the voting age in smaller increments which is probably the way it has to happen although i'm attracted to the thought of doing it as a big bang because i think that's actually more galvanizing and less gerrymandering just because it's so much more open and unpredictable but there are obviously lots of groups lots of organizations campaigning for lowering the voting age to 16 and some want to go a bit further.

8:32But you don't get a lot of traction if you go below 14 and 12 is probably about the limit, I would say. The only other thing I would say is, clearly there are lots of things we could do to think about how children could feel more connected and more involved in politics. I just slightly recoil from the patronising paternalistic civics education ones. Not against civics education, but I wish it went along with giving children more power. I would love children to have more power. In the school where I spent a term doing this, not teaching it, absolutely didn't go in as a teacher. I went in, I said to the children to learn from them.

9:13I wanted to just know what they thought about politics. The head teacher of the school was very engaged with the project until the idea came up that the kids would have power in the school to set the school budget, at which point he wanted to run a long way away from that thing. So there's not yet a group campaigning? I mean, there are, I belong to some online communities, there are groups who are very interested in this idea. It doesn't, I don't think it has that kind of political traction, but I would want to say to people who are, lots of well-meaning people who want to involve children more, get them better informed, but better engaged.

9:49All I would say is when you're doing that, ask the question, does any of this come with more power because if it doesn't come with more power it is a little bit patronizing and it's the power that people find frightening giving children power i actually am not as frightened as giving children power as i am of giving some politicians that i could name power so i would ask people to focus on the question is there even anywhere in this proposal where the kids would feel, I actually have a say. It might even just be the say to say, I'm not doing the civics lesson, I'm going to go and play for another half and hour.

10:27I have a question about populists. Are children more vulnerable to sort of populist ideas that might be thrown out because they feel like they're going to give us power, but in theory, you know, some of these policies maybe haven't been thought through properly? Yeah, I mean, I think they might be. I also think we would be hyper-conscious of that. And so we might be more conscious of trying to put protections in place, which might be protections for all of us against being bombarded with ideas that are designed to trigger us in various ways. honestly I think we don't know and my experience of talking to children about this is that actually partly because I think they're more familiar with the genre in the sense they're almost everything they're exposed to is populist in some way or another whether it's cartoons or anything else they they see what it is that they're getting they were quite quick to identify the politicians who are offering them ridiculously easy answers as such.

11:33I'm not saying they've got an antenna to spot a wrong one when they see one, but I don't know whether they're better or worse than we are. We're all vulnerable to it. I just don't know. I don't think it's a reason not to do this. The other really intriguing obstacle that politicians would face here comes to online targeting of voters because there are far more protections for young people on the internet for example so it's interesting that if they were being campaigned to the campaign has to work around these obstacles that are put in place to protect children which are greater protections than adults get yeah and i accept some people might say particularly if you really don't trust politicians that the politicians when they have an incentive to water down those protections in order to get kids votes will do so.

12:24But my feeling is actually we are super conscious about this risk. So just look at the arguments about smartphones and social media and children. A lot of people will be familiar with adults saying, why do they get the protections? Why don't we get the protections too? I wish someone would take my phone off me. I think this would be an actual practical version of that. I have a feeling that if we enfranchise children, and I do, I really want to insist on this, I do think this should happen through schools. Schools are great, right? Schools are really serious places where serious people worry about protection.

13:00Child protection is central to our culture. And enfranchising children, I don't think would necessarily water down child protection. I think it might lead to more adult protection from some of these harms than they are harms. We live in a society saturated with addictive technologies. And at election time, some of those addictions are used. I would benefit, you would benefit. I think we would all benefit from a bit more protection from that. Thank you, Luke, for those brilliant questions. We've now got a voice note from Marilyn. Hello, my name is Marilyn Ramsden. I'm now 79 and was the first and only university graduate from my Welsh working-class family.

13:47My working-class parents were dedicated voters for the Conservative Party because they believed in self-determination and free enterprise. I was surrounded by socialist ideas at university and could not vote until I was 21. Yet for several years, I continued to vote like my parents. surely young children would simply follow instructions from family and just perpetuate the politics of the older generation rather than bringing in a new order thank you as with all of these objections i'm not going to say for sure that wouldn't happen it might happen but I think it happens much more among adults than we are aware of.

14:39I think Marilyn, her story is an interesting one. She moved away from her parents' voting pattern. Not everybody does. I'm sure we all know families where it's still pretty tribal. There are also people who have rebelled long before they went to university, didn't need to be exposed to socialist ideas at university to have already thought, if my parents are voting that way, I'm going to vote the other way. And I think these dynamics would probably play out with children too. So I don't know that it would work that way. But I think the other thing it is worth saying about our societies is they are multi-generational.

15:17Lots of multi-generational families coexist in all sorts of ways. They might live under the same roof. There might be closer relationships that bypass a generation it's complicated family life is complicated in all sorts of ways if this is a family dynamic i still think it's more unpredictable than we might expect and within any family dynamic i want to move away from thinking this is about six-year-olds take 14 year olds so enfranchise them too i really don't think we know where a 14 year old would think the power lies in blended families, in multi-generational families, where the real influence is.

15:58I think it varies from family to family. Thanks, Marilyn. This next question has been written in by Safina Ahmed. What would success look like for such a proposal in terms of measurable outcomes, given that we know it is open to scrutiny and even ridicule slash satire? How can the proposal have clear guardrails showing that this is a legitimate policy proposal rather than one that could be seen as attention grabbing? And is there any evidence or examples that can be pointed to showing that this is already in action or deliverable? So I don't think for your programme you want to go down the road of thinking attention grabbing is a bad thing in itself because some ideas need to try and grab attention.

16:47No, there aren't examples to point to to be able to say, look, we've seen it works. It's not as scary as you think. There is none of that. And that is the attraction of it for me. This is not an argument based on me marshalling a set of evidence, bringing data with me because it hasn't happened anywhere. The voting age is lower than 18 in some places. Nowhere is it anywhere near six. And I think the unpredictability of it is really important. And it is worth remembering that there are different ways of defining democracy. But if you go right back to its origins in the ancient world, one of the points of democracy is that it was somewhat random in the sense that there is a more radical idea than this, which is that our representatives should be chosen at random from among us.

17:43Parliament should be made up of people who are chosen by lottery. Lots of serious people advocate that. They say it worked in Athens. It's not quite true. You have citizens' assemblies, which I suppose are... You do, but the radical idea would be you would replace our elected parliament with such an assembly. And that assembly would also include the executive. Citizens' assemblies are simply usually advisory bodies, never mind lawmaking bodies, never mind that the prime minister is chosen at random. But in the ancient world, important offices were held chosen at random from among the citizens, should be said, who were limited to males and men of property of some kind.

18:18So slaves, children, women are excluded, all of that. But still pretty damn radical as an idea. And that randomness was part of the point of democracy, because democracy is meant to prevent things getting captured, held onto by classes, by elites, by the wealthy and so on, injecting into the system something, not saying it's going to work. The person who's got the office might be no good at it, but that's better than the office being captured by the same people over and over and over again. Randomness is not a bad thing in democratic politics. Unpredictability is not a bad thing. If you know what the outcome is going to be, and you can say it's going to be a good thing, you are no longer a Democrat.

18:59You're something else. I know that you have done focus groups. You've been in schools. It's not that you have have not brought this idea to people, including six-year-olds. If you were to go the next step, because people do ask you, as I can see from this last question, they want to know the outcomes. They want sort of harder data, I think, to test against what's a theory. If you had to now do some kind of experiment that could be peer-reviewed, look at the results of it, what would be the next step in trying to actually make some data. So I'm going to annoy you by saying, I don't think that's the way this sort of argument should go.

19:44I went into schools not to gather data, but to learn, to ask questions, to see what happened, but not to put together a package which could be presented in order to reassure people. And there are lots of ways in which you could do that in relation to this. It would have to be pretty piecemeal. There have been various experiments to run would-be franchises with children, see what would happen if children were given the vote, what the outcome would be. I'm suspicious of all of those things because there is no substitute for actual voting. Saying to children, if you were allowed to vote in the next general election, how would you vote?

20:28Gathering all of the results, say doing it for the whole country, you could do it, right? cost quite a lot of money. I'm not sure who'd fund it, but you could do it. And you could say, if kids, if the voting age was six in this election, this would have been the result. Not meaningless, but not far off meaningless, because those kids would not be being campaigned to by politicians in the way the adults were. The kids would not be thinking about it in the way that people who have the vote were thinking about it. You just don't know. That's the attraction of the idea for me. Thank you, Safina. Our final question is from Richard Guise.

21:04Richard says, as one of the qualifiers for voting, age is certainly a poor proxy for competence, which could be more accurately inferred from tests for both rationality and knowledge. However, would the cost and effort involved in introducing such tests be better and more cheaply directed, not at the elected, but at the candidate standing for election? So I actually think that standing for election is quite a good test of ability, which is one of the reasons why I think kids would be unlikely to win elections in which they stood. Certainly young kids, maybe older teenagers. Some of them we know, some of them are incredibly impressive, including impressive public performers.

21:50Of course, the thing that's being tested for is not straightforwardly competence. it's a range of qualities. It is also very interesting that in by-elections, for instance, we recently had one in Makerfield in the UK, candidates come under much more scrutiny, and incompetence of various kinds is more likely to be exposed under that kind of pressure. In a general election, it's quite easy to pass under the radar. If you've been selected for the party that's going to win, you're going to win anyway, even if you're no good. Some MPs are much better at the job than others. I still have an anxiety, not just about sort of costs and time and trouble, but just the question of how these tests would be applied, who would design them, who's going to test the testers.

22:35You could get an infinite regress here. Who does one imagine deciding on the criteria for this kind of thing? Democracy is a very imperfect system. I'm not going to trot out the cliche that I'm sure many people know about it being the dot, dot, dot. Well, I will trot it out. the cliche says usually attributed to Churchill it's the worst system apart from all the others that have been tried has more to be said for it than that but it is deeply imperfect electoral democracy has all sorts of challenges and problems to it all sorts of things can go wrong it can produce outcomes that baffle everybody but that attempt to and I'm going to use this word to engineer it so that for the people who are doing the engineering, it produces outcomes that they're happier with.

23:20Seems to me to go against the spirit of it. And I do understand why people hate my idea. I also understand why people laugh at my idea. I would want to insist that it is in the spirit of the kind of democracy that we have. And I would be more wary of proposals that are against that spirit, even if they seem ostensibly to be offering better outcomes, that one that is in keeping with that spirit and is actually an enhancement of that spirit. It may be one day this way of doing politics will be cast into the dustbin of history and it'll all be robots, AI, engineers, I don't know. But for now, I'm still quite attached to it.

24:02And I don't think enfranchising children is giving up in the way that some other proposals would be. Thank you for all your questions and thank you for answering them David. Thank you for asking me to answer them, they were pretty interesting questions. Radical will be back with another episode on Thursday but for me, it's goodbye Christmas 1988 a plane takes off from Heathrow Airport 38 minutes later, everyone on board is dead A Libyan man, Abdul Bassett al-Megrahi is convicted of murdering 270 people. But that's not the end of the story. Almost four decades on, fresh evidence and a new trial.

24:48I'm Miles Bonner. In this podcast, I'm delving into a world of extremist groups, mysterious intelligence agents and global politics. From Radio 4, this is Intrigue, Lockerbie. Listen first on BBC Sounds.

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