Are 16- and 17-Year-Olds Mature Enough to Vote?
One of the most common concerns with the proposal to lower the voting age to 16 is the maturity level and capability of 16- and 17-year-olds to make informed decisions while voting. However, research shows that 16- and 17-year-olds demonstrate the same levels of citizenship and cold cognition — the cognition ideally used in voting — as adults who have the right to vote.
In a study called “American Sixteen- and Seventeen- Year- Olds Are Ready to Vote” Authors Daniel Hart and Robert Atkins concluded that “by 16 years of age — but not before — American adolescents manifest levels of development in each quality of citizenship that are approximately the same as those apparent in young American adults who are allowed to vote.” To come to this conclusion, the authors examined the developmental trajectories for 6 different components of citizenship: tolerance, civic knowledge, political skills, political efficacy, political interest and volunteering. In Figure 1 below — which details their findings and the developmental curves for each of these components of citizenship — it is clear that there is not much development of these qualities between ages 16 and 18. However, there are steep developmental trajectories between the ages of 14 and 16.
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This led the authors to the conclusion that “16-year-olds are prepared to vote responsibly” because “on measures of civic knowledge, political skills, political efficacy, and tolerance, the 16 -year-olds, on average, are obtaining scores similar to those of adults.”
Figure 7: Developmental trajectories of components of citizenship from “American Sixteen- and Seventeen- Year- Olds Are Ready to Vote.” The X axis shows a range of ages while the Y axis shows a proportion of the mean score of 19-30 year olds that the 14-18 year olds obtained on measures of citizenship.
Aren’t 16-year-olds more likely to make impulsive decisions?
To answer this question we must first define 2 different types of cognition: hot and cold cognition. Hot cognition is what drives quickly made emotional and impulsive decisions, whereas cold cognition drives thought out, logical and informed decisions made over long periods of time. As detailed by Hart & Atkins, while hot cognition is not fully developed in 16-year-olds, cold cognition is.
“No doubt, 16- and 17-year-olds are not fully mature. [...] adolescents' capacities to restrain impulsive, emotional behavior may be reduced relative to that of adults [...] [But] these capacities do not figure prominently in citizenship and particularly in voting.”
“Citizenship and voting in the electoral process require, for the most part, decisions made over long periods of time, which allows for deliberation and discussion with others.”
This type of decision making is classified as cold cognition (as mentioned above), and research shows that cold cognition, unlike hot cognition, is fully developed in 16-and 17-year-olds. The idea that cold cognition is fully developed in 16-year-olds is corroborated by Figure 2, in which Professor Zelazo’s study demonstrates that by age 15, young adults are obtaining similar scores to adults on executive function tests.
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Figure 8: The results from Philip Zelazo (professor at the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development)’s study on cold cognition and executive function. Source: Vox
The results of these studies discredit the concern that the right to vote should be withheld from 16- and 17-year-olds on the basis of their maturity. These studies demonstrate that not only do 16- and 17-year-olds demonstrate similar levels of citizenship as older adults who can vote, but the cold cognition necessary to make informed decisions when voting is also developed in 16- and 17-year-olds.