Abstract:
Are competence prerequisites for voting compatible with respecting a universal right to vote? I seek to show that they are in fact compatible. I offer a novel analysis of what respecting a person’s right to vote involves. A distinction is drawn between two types of abilities: synchronic ability and diachronic ability. I argue that a person’s right to vote is respected if and only if they are guaranteed a diachronic ability to vote. I propose a number of conditions that must be satisfied for a person to have diachronic ability to vote. I then suggest potential forms of competence prerequisites that are compatible with the suggested conditions. In particular, I argue in favour of agent-relative forms of competence prerequisite, under which every citizen would have the ability to pass such competence prerequisites by design. In addition to being compatible with universal suffrage, such prerequisites avoid several problems faced by non-agent-relative forms of competence prerequisites.
Word count: 4999
1. Introduction
A competence prerequisite for voting makes it the case that only those who pass some competence-based criteria are allowed to vote. It is easy to see the appeal in such competence prerequisites these days. Althaus (2003) showed that knowledge has a large systematic effect on policy preferences. Yet, empirical evidence suggests that voters are ignorant in ways that make it difficult for them to vote according to their own interests or the common interests of the group. Caplan (2007), for example, observes that the public’s views on a number of economic issues differ wildly from the views of economists. Nevertheless, competence prerequisites are commonly thought to be a temptation that ought to be resisted, as a competence requirement for political participation appears incompatible with democracy.
The prima facie conflict between a competence requirement for political participation and democracy is easy to see. One of the defining features of democracy seems to be that it grants all citizens an equal right to participate at some essential stage of political decision making.[1] However, a competence requirement, if it is to be meaningful, would involve not allowing citizens to vote based on alleged incompetence. Even those who argue in favor of a competence-based voting requirement tend to assume that competence prerequisites are undemocratic. Brennan (2011, 2016), for example, seems to draw a sharp distinction between democracy and epistocracy, ‘in which suffrage is restricted to citizens of sufficient political competence’ (2011, p. 700).
Many reasons have been given for endorsing a universal equal right to participate in political decisions.[2] I will not attempt to address whether there is a universal right to participate in political decision making. In this essay, I will only be concerned with clarifying what a universal right to participate requires and whether it rules out a competence prerequisite for participation. There are admittedly many forms of political participation, ranging from publicly speaking in favor of a political position to making laws as an elected official. Different considerations exist for different forms of political participation. For example, hate speech presents a unique problem for the right to make political speech (Waldron, 2012), but not other forms of political participation. To circumscribe the scope of this essay, I will be exclusively concerned with the right to vote and a competence prerequisite thereof, even though voting is only one form of political participation. Nonetheless, what I say will likely be applicable to other forms of political participation as well.
It seems obvious that a competence prerequisite that denies someone’s ability to vote violates her voting. This essay seeks to reject this seemingly obvious claim and argue that, under certain conditions, a competence prerequisite is compatible with respecting the voting rights of those who fail to pass it. To be clear, my project is to show that competence requirements don’t inherently or necessarily undermine a universal equal right to vote. I am not making the obviously false claim that a competence requirement is compatible with a universal right to vote, no matter what form it takes or how it is implemented. I am also not making the more ambitious claim that a competence requirement is compatible with democracy, as respecting a universal right to vote might not be a sufficient condition for democracy.
In section 2, I discuss preliminary issues, including natural implementation-specific worries about competence requirements. In section 3, I argue that the appearance of incompatibility is due to a confusion about what the right to vote involves. I will lay out an account of what it is to satisfy a right to perform an action, where to satisfy a claim-right to perform some action X is to be guaranteed an ability to X. I distinguish between two notions of ability, diachronic ability and synchronic ability. To a right to X respected is to be guaranteed a diachronic ability to X. In section 4, I defend the claim that competence prerequisites are compatible with a universal right to vote, though I raise the worry that compatible competence prerequisites are going to be trivially easy for most people. In section 5, I discuss the merits of agent-relative competence prerequisites, which I argue to be both compatible with universal suffrage and do not face problems that non-agent-relative competence prerequisites face.
2. Preliminaries
Competence prerequisites may take many forms. It can, for example, take the form of a voter qualification exam, where a citizen must demonstrate a certain level of relevant knowledge (perhaps about the policy proposals of the candidates as well as relevant demographic and economic facts). More elaborate forms of competence prerequisites are possible too. For example, a certain level of education may act as a criterion for voting. Another possibility is to requires voters to complete an educational course, which I will discuss. Here, I am not concerned with any particular form of prerequisite. Rather, my goal is to show that at least some forms of competence prerequisites are compatible with the right to vote.
Before we continue, it might be wise to try to dispel some hostile reactions we might naturally have against competence requirements. It is clear that implementing a competence requirement in a way that is completely fair and without corruption or manipulation is difficult to achieve. However, we must distinguish between two types of objections toward a policy. Some worries are implementational; they only target specific implementations of a policy, rather than the policy itself. Implementational worries are contingent in some way. They might claim that some, or even most, implementations of a policy have problematic features. Other implementational worries claim that no desirable implementation of competence requirements is possible under some or most circumstances. Examples of implementational issues include the potential under-representation of disadvantaged social groups, the potential epistemically damaging features of educated portions of the populace (Estlund, 2003), the potentially reduced cognitive diversity which might have an adverse effect on decision quality (Hong and Page, 2004), and the possibility of manipulation. These issues largely depend on the specific circumstances and implementations. In more equal societies, many such issues wouldn’t arise in the first place. Even in unequal societies, a monetary incentive to political participation as well as special educational programs can help ensure that the competence requirement does not result in a group of voters that is unrepresentative of the general population. It may also be possible to address the possibility of manipulation through policies. Even though it is hard to trust some officials to design a fair voter exam, it might be reasonable to trust that a randomly selected citizens jury will be able to design a voter exam that doesn’t reflect the prejudices or biases of any particular group. Nevertheless, although I think many such worries can be adequately addressed in relatively feasible ways, I am not primarily concerned with addressing implementational issues in this essay.
In this essay, I am mainly concerned with whether there is a problem with competence requirements in principle, or whether some core features of competence requirements make them necessarily incompatible with a universal right to participate for all citizens. That said, it would be trivial for an extremely weak form of competence requirement to be compatible with a universal equal right to vote. I wish to defend forms of competence requirements that are much stronger than this. I am interested in whether a non-trivial competence prerequisite can be compatible with a universal right to participate, even if only a small proportion of the population in fact passes the requirement.
3. What Is It to Have a Right to Vote?
Compare two hypothetical countries, country A and country B, that were holding referendums on the same issue. Suppose that, in both countries, only 30% of citizens had any desire to vote, and all citizens who had the desire to vote voted. In the end, the same policy was chosen. However, in country A, all citizens could have registered to vote if they wanted to, and they can vote if and only if they registered. In country B, everyone who didn’t vote was not allowed to vote by law because they are considered peasants due to the status of their parents. It seems clear that the referendum in country A was democratic, but not the referendum in country B. We say that country A upholds a universal right to vote, but country B does not. What is the relevant difference between country A and country B that explains this difference?
As a first pass, one may suggest that the relevant difference consists in the fact that the ability to vote is conditional in some way in country B, but unconditional in country A. However, we can quickly see that mere conditionality cannot defeat the right to vote, as rights are almost always conditional in some way. In many, if not all democracies, the ability to vote is conditional on having registered to vote. It would be absurd to complain that a voter registration requirement (that is sufficiently easy to fulfil) violates one’s right to vote.
When we talk about voting rights, we are using ‘right’ in the ‘claim-right’ sense, where to have a right to X is to have a moral claim to X (Hohfeld, 1919). To have a claim to X is either for other people to have a moral duty to not interfere with your access to X if you already has access, or for them to have a moral duty to provide you with X if you currently lack access. When we have a claim-right to an action, such as in the case of voting, to have a claim-right to do an action Y is for others to have a moral duty to guaranteed your ability to do Y, either by not interfering with your existing ability to do Y or by providing you with the ability to do Y. Notably, being guaranteed a right to do something is compatible with the right not being exercised. For my right to free speech to be respected, I do not need to actually speak. To be guaranteed a right to take medical treatments, I don’t have to in fact take the treatment. Having a right to some action Y is really a right to the ability to Y. For the right to some action Y to be respected, it is the ability to Y that must be guaranteed by others, not Y itself. In other words, the right to vote is the right to the ability to vote. Under this account, the crucial difference between country A and country B is that country A guarantees all its citizens the ability to vote but country B doesn’t. Still, a question remains, what is it to have an ability to vote?
The abilities literature distinguishes between general and specific abilities (Mele, 2003). According to Vetter and Jaster’s characterisation (2017), general abilities ‘have to do with what the agent can do across a large range of circumstances’, whereas specific abilities ‘have to do with what the agent can do in a particular situation’ (p. 2). To borrow an example from Maier (2018), consider a professional tennis player who is miles away from a tennis court and lacks a request and balls. Because she is currently not in a position to play tennis, she lacks the specific ability to play tennis. Nevertheless, she still has the general ability to play tennis, since she is a competent tennis player.
It is helpful to further distinguish between two types of specific abilities: synchronic ability and diachronic ability. Both have to do with a specific action in a particular situation. Synchronic ability has to do with what immediate actions a subject can perform at a given time. Whereas, diachronic ability has to do with whether a subject, at a given time, can perform a specific future action. Consider our tennis player again. Imagine that the tennis player has a tennis match today. Unfortunately, she woke up late and is miles away from the tennis court at the time of the match. The tennis player, at the time of the match, lacks the synchronic ability to play in the match. Now let’s turn our attention to last night. Suppose the tennis player could have made sure that she would make it to the match (perhaps by setting several alarm clocks). Then, we can say that, last night, she had the diachronic ability to play in the match today.
Synchronic and diachronic abilities are not merely theoretical constructs; we ascribe them regularly in natural language. Consider: ‘Yesterday, she had the ability to play in today’s match, but she no longer has this ability anymore’. It seems that the first ascription is about diachronic ability and the second is about synchronic ability.
Let us see how this applies to the ability to vote. It seems clear to me that, in contexts of the voting rights, we should be concerned with the diachronic ability, and not the synchronic ability. In every US state except North Dakota, voters need to go through voter registration before voting. In California, the voter registration deadline is a few weeks before election day. After the deadline, those who have not registered to vote will not have the synchronic ability to vote in this election. This, by itself, doesn’t seem to show that California has failed to guarantee these voters a right to vote. Even in countries where voter registration is not required or automatic, citizens are often required to be in the right place at the right time to vote . Democracies do not and cannot be required to guarantee that each citizen will have a synchronic ability to vote. Not having a synchronic ability to vote may be the citizen’s own choice. What is crucially important for a citizen’s right to vote, however, is whether the citizen, at some point, has the diachronic ability to vote.
A general analysis of what it is to have a diachronic ability to vote will be too daunting a task to undertake here. Instead, I will make several generalisations about conditions under which a person can be said to have a diachronic ability to vote.
When evaluating whether an agent has an ability, we hold certain facts fixed (Schwarz, 2020). In the context of voting, we ask if there is a course of actions open to the agent that will lead to the agent voting given the agent’s knowledge, social identities, wealth, location, laws and policy implementations of the state at the time of ascription, etc.
Further, it is no good if the only possible world where an agent votes is one where the agent votes accidentally or by mere luck. Mele (2003) considers an agent voting for a candidate by pulling a lever. Unbeknownst to the agent, the lever is attached to a randomizing device, offering the agent’s vote only a 0.001 chance of being counted. By luck, the agent succeeds in registering his vote. It is plausible, Mele claims, that the agent’s vote for her preferred candidate is too lucky to count as an intentional action. My own intuition is that the agent also lacked the ability to vote in the relevant sense. To me, the problem seems to be that the agent couldn’t have known that his actions would have led to his vote succeeding. If this is right, then an agent has the ability to vote in the relevant sense only if it is possible for the agent to choose the relevant course of action, knowing that the course of action will lead to her voting. This condition predicts, I think correctly, that a system which unpredictably discards votes (such as a system where some votes might not arrive before the deadline because of an overwhelmed postal service) fails to respect the right to vote of not just those whose votes are discarded, but also those whose votes are counted. In such cases, voting is subject to a quasi-random process and voters lack knowledge that courses of action available to them will lead to them voting.
Lastly, the cost of voting cannot be prohibitively high. It is clearly unacceptable if the only way a person can vote is by losing her job or taking on a significant level of risk to her health. Nonetheless, some level of cost to voting has to be permissible. In existing democracies, people have to go through the trouble of registering, transportation and waiting in line in order to vote. In most cases, these hurdles are seen as compatible with respecting voting rights. To be sure, it is hard to say where we should draw the line of a cost being ‘too high’ as commonly is the case in philosophy. The indeterminacy would not pose a problem for my purposes as long as there are possible forms of competence prerequisites that clearly belong in the ‘not too high’ category, a claim that I will defend. Notably, the notion of cost here cannot simply be psychological cost. In the sense of ‘ability’ that we are interested in here, a person may still have the ability to vote even if it is psychologically impossible for her to intend (choose/want/try) to vote (Vihvelin, 2004). If some agent has a voting-phobia, where she is disgusted by the very act of voting and would rather do anything else than vote, it would be inappropriate to accuse the state of failing to guarantee the person’s right to vote on this basis. This puts pressure for us to employ an objective notion of cost. But I will not pursue the point further.
Independent of states’ obligation to respect a citizen’s right to vote, states also have an obligation to not put up arbitrary hurdles to voting. Requiring a citizen to do 10 push ups before he can vote does not seem to violate her right to vote per se, provided that she could do 10 push ups if she wanted to. Complaining that this denies the citizen the right to vote is to misdiagnose the problem. It is impermissible for the state to pose such a requirement because it serves no legitimate purpose. For the present essay, I will assume that competence prerequisites do serve a legitimate purpose, in so far as they improve the collective decision making quality. However, I will also argue later that, competence prerequisites need not increase the objective costs to voting on the balance, if voters are justly compensated for their efforts.
To summarize, a person has a diachronic ability to vote in a particular election at time t only if there is a course of intentional actions open to the person at time t which she is in a position to know at time t will lead to her voting, given her circumstances, and this course of intentional action must not be too costly. In a slogan, one has a relevant ability to vote only if the sole thing standing between the agent and the act of voting is the agent’s own volition. Respecting a universal right to vote requires the state to ensure that each citizen will have had a diachronic ability to vote in a given election at some point before the end of the election. The possession of the ability to vote is binary; one either will have had it or one will not. Similarly, the right to vote is either respected or not respected. However, I am not saying that the state ought to be indifferent between a low election turnout and a high , provided that each person’s right to vote is respected. Indeed, I think there are excellent reasons for the state to encourage voting as much as possible. But the duty to encourage more voting seems supererogatory for democracies in a way, whereas respecting the right to vote seems central to the very foundation of democracy.
Let us see if it is possible for the right to vote to be respected, given our criteria, under a competence prerequisite for voting.
4. Competence Prerequisites and the Right to Vote
A competence prerequisite for voting makes it the case that one can only vote after passing some criteria of competence. In other words, only those who meet some criteria of competence can have the synchronic ability to vote. If a competence prerequisite is to be non-trivial, it will bar at least some people from having the synchronic ability to vote in an election. If I am right that to respect the right to vote is to guarantee the ability to vote, it is not surprising that people would assume that a meaningful competence prerequisite must necessarily disrespect some people’s right to vote. However, this is a mistake. As I argued earlier, if a universal synchronic ability to vote (at some point before the end of the election) is required, then voter registration, and having designated voting stations would both be ruled out. The right to vote concerns the diachronic, not synchronic, ability to vote.
Competence prerequisites need not be incompatible with a universal diachronic ability to vote. They impose on each citizen an additional condition that must be satisfied for the citizen to be in circumstances in which she has synchronic ability to vote. There seems to be two ways in which a competence prerequisite can prevent an agent from having a diachronic ability to vote. Firstly, citizens may be prevented from having a diachronic ability to vote if the competence prerequisite increases the objective cost of voting to a prohibitively high level. Secondly, an agent would be deprived of an ability to vote if she lacks the diachronic ability to pass the competence requirement itself. I will respond to these two problems in turn.
The first issue of raising the cost to vote seems relatively simple to resolve. We can counterbalance the increased cost to vote by compensating the voter, most likely in the form of a monetary payment. In a similar vein, Ackerman and Fishkin (2004) suggested that voters are paid $150 for taking part on their ‘deliberation day’, when registered voters are called together to discuss central issues surrounding an election. Such a payment incentivizes participation, but it also recognizes the value of the citizen’s efforts and the contributions she makes to the cooperative political project by participating.
However, a uniform level of monetary compensation may not be sufficient for some perspective voters. Spending time to pass a competence prerequisite may be more costly for some people than others. For example, it may be impossible for carers spend the time required without compromising their obligations to people they care for. To avoid violating the right to vote in these positions, special provisions ought to be made. One of three things may be done. The state can enact measures to lower the cost for them, provide more compensation, or exempt them from the competence prerequisite.
The second issue does not seem to rule out all competence prerequisites either. It is easy to see that we can design a competence prerequisite in such a way that every citizen will have a diachronic ability to pass it. A trivially easy exam, for example, would satisfy this criteria. Moreover, I think it is not implausible that there may be non-trivial voter exams that each citizen has an ability to pass. For example, an exam may require the voter to know the policy positions of mainstream candidates, according to the candidates themselves. Provided that every citizen has the opportunity to easily acquire this knowledge, it is not obvious that such a voter exam would be in principle any different from other hurdles to voting, like voter registration. Nevertheless, my argument does not hang on the possibility of designing a non-trivial voter exam that every citizen has the ability to pass. Even if such an exam is indeed possible, one might still worry about the cost-effectiveness of an exam that is so easy that every citizen, regardless of learning abilities, can pass it. I wish to focus on another potential kind of competence prerequisites.
5. Agent-Relative Competence Prerequisites
The worry that any acceptable voter exam is bound to be too easy to be useful assumes that we will employ an absolute criteria of competence — a criteria that does not vary from person to person. However, this neglects the possibility of prerequisites that employ agent-relative competence criteria. An agent-relative competence prerequisite would require of each perspective voter a level of competence that is within their reach. Such a prerequisite would serve the purpose of improving collective decision making quality, while expressing equal respect for each person’s ‘authority to make claims concerning the rules under which we all shall live’ as democratic values require (Anderson, 2009, p. 215). Compared to absolute competence prerequisites, agent-relative competence prerequisites allow us to avoid making ‘invidious comparisons among citizens with respect to their normative political wisdom’ (Estlund, 2009, p. 36) in the process of evaluating an agent’s competence.
Consider a voter education program that is freely available to all citizens. A citizen is only considered ‘competent’ and allowed to vote if he has completed the program. If we wish, we can ensure that the education program only provides uncontested factual information or teach ways to acquire such information that are widely seen as reliable. The program can be tailored to everyone’s background in appropriate ways. This may involve having each prospective voter choose a training program that they are comfortable with or will find helpful. Similar to Ackerman and Fishkin’s (2004) deliberation day, the program may involve a day of work. At the end of the education program, each person is evaluated according to standards that are also tailored to the individual such that everyone can pass if they tried. Alternatively, the program may involve no evaluative processes at all. In this case, each person that completes the program is deemed to have passed the competence prerequisite. Such a program would resemble López-Guerra’s (2011) enfranchisement lottery, where thousands of individuals are randomly selected to become ‘prevoters’. To earn the (synchronic) ability to vote, ‘prevoters’ need to participate in various competence-building exercises. According to my account of voting rights, this would clearly not be compatible with universal suffrage. In contrast, under the voter education program that I suggested, everyone has the option to participate in the program. It is plausible that going through a well-designed voter education program, even without evaluation, will have a noticeable impact on voter knowledge, improving the quality of collective decision making. The idea of this training program is analogous to the type of briefing people undergo for citizens juries, deliberative polling (Fishkin, 1988), and indeed trial juries. It aims to facilitate the acquirement of relevant knowledge. By the program’s very design, every citizen would have the diachronic ability to pass it. The program, then, would not prevent citizens from having the relevant ability to vote in this way.
Would epistocrats like Brennan find an agent-relative standard of competence acceptable? It is unclear. Brennan (2016) characterizes competence as an ‘epistemic and moral character’ (p. 154). He does not specify if this entails that each person need to meet the same standard of ‘epistemic and moral character’. However, there is evidence that he would be open to an agent-relative notion of competence. López-Guerra’s enfranchisement lottery is among the forms of epistocracy that Brennan (2016) defend. Since the enfranchisement lottery would deem everyone who participates in the competence-building program ‘competent’, it seems to entail an agent-relative standard of competence.
Conclusion
In this essay, I defended the claim that competence requirements can be compatible with a universal right to vote in political decision making. I argued that we should understand a right to participate as a guaranteed diachronic ability to participate. In doing so, I also laid out the boundaries of acceptable forms of hurdles to voting. I defended the compatibility between a competence prerequisite and respecting the universal right to vote, and argued in favor of agent-relative forms of competence prerequisites.
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[1] Theorists who have acknowledged an inclusive suffrage as part of the conception of democracy include: Beckman (2008), Dahl (1989), Held (1996), Lipset (1959), Paxton (2003), Oppenheim (1971), and Sartori (1965). Democracy is sometimes defined by criteria other than inclusiveness of political participatory processes. For example, some scholars define democracy as political systems where ‘rulers are selected by competitive elections’ (Przeworski et al., 2000, p. 15; a similar definition is offered by Cheibub et al., 2010). Such a definition is clearly incompatible with normal usage of the term, since even countries where women and racial minorities lack the right to vote could count as democracies by this criteria (Beckman, 2008).
[2] By ‘universal right’, I do not intend to mean a right that extends to literally everyone. Rather, it is universal in the sense that it is possessed by all members of the demos. The question of who the demos includes is a difficult question in its own right (Dahl, 1989). Common restrictions to membership in the demos include those based on age, sanity, citizenship, etc. Although some theorists, notably Locke (1689, as cited in Dahl, 1989), endorses a competence requirement for membership in the demos, I will assume that competence is not a requirement for membership, since otherwise my task becomes trivial.
Some arguments appeal to the instrumental role of universal suffrage in providing a secure sense of self-respect (Rawls, 1993), or in the development of one’s character (Mill, 1861; Cook, 2013). Christiano (2003) argues that individuals are the best judges to what their own interests consist of, as some pieces of information are only available from the first-person standpoint. Singer (1973) and Waldron (1999) argue that giving everyone an equal say expresses equal respect for everyone’s point of view. Christiano (2001) claim that justice requires that the society be organized in such a way where everyone can see that they are being treated as equals. The only way to do this, he argues, is by giving everyone an equal say. Lastly, Rousseau (1762/1950) and Gould (1988) have argued that people only have a chance at self-rule if they have a chance to participate in making the laws they live under.
