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In a modern democracy:
- all adult citizens can participate in the elections;
- citizens “rule” through elected representatives – this is called representative democracy;
- power is limited by law – this is called the rule of law and liberal democracy.
In modern democracies, the right to participate is granted to all adult citizens of a political community, regardless of any differences that exist between them, such as, for example, differences in terms of gender, age, class, property status, ethnicity, etc.
The right to participate in decision-making on public issues in modern democracies is thus extended almost to the maximum. The history of the struggle to expand the right to vote may seem like a distant past to us from today’s perspective. That this is not the case is evident because some countries, which today we consider models of democracy, such as Switzerland, introduced universal suffrage for women only in the second half of the 20th century.
Today, in modern democratic states, the only possible space for expanding the right to vote is age, that is, the possibility of including younger and younger age groups in the demos. In most European democracies, the right to vote, or the right to be included in the demos, is acquired from 18 years of age. During the past decade, there have been discussions in a number of democratic countries about expanding the demos further, that is, the right to vote should be made available from the age of 16. In Croatia, this topic is quite neglected, so only in recent years has the lowering of the voting age been sporadically mentioned.
Austria has gone the farthest in lowering the voting age, where since July 2007 the voting age in all elections has been 16 years. In some European countries (Germany and Switzerland) an age limit of 16 applies, but only for voting in local elections. An interesting discussion of the reasons why the voting age should be lowered to 16 can be found on the website: www.youthrights.org
Source:
Šalaj, B., Hoffmann, D. & Horvat. M. 2018. Edukacija za građansku pismenost Gonga: Politička pismenost, Zagreb, Croatia. Retrieved from: https://gong.hr/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/PolitickaPismenostprirucnik_revizija.pdf