Institutions, Marine Tondelier
Voting age: Right to vote at 16, with civic education
Direction of change: decrease, compared with current law.
The lever. Age from which one can vote, set at 18, the age of majority, since 1974. Some propose 16, for all elections or for local elections only. Direction rule: ↑ higher voting age.
« Rendre le droit de vote réellement universel. Ouvrir le droit de vote à 16 ans avec une formation civique. »1Translation by the editorsMake the right to vote truly universal. Extend the right to vote to 16-year-olds, with civic education.
Encoding
No cost-schedule parameter for this position: see the costing for the reason.
Costing
Announced by the candidate
not announced
The programme does not cost this measure.
Published costings
none
No external costing of this position recorded to date.
Our calculation
lever that cannot be costed
Lever with no coefficient in the cost schedule: the position is compared, not costed.
Current law, sources and limits of the cost schedule
Current law. Voters are French nationals of full age (Constitution, art. 3) who have reached eighteen (Code électoral, art. L2, as worded by act no. 74-631 of 5 July 1974, which lowered the age from 21 to 18). The age of civil majority is set at eighteen (Code civil, art. 414). Lowering the voting age to 16 for all elections would require, on the usual reading, revising article 3 of the Constitution or lowering the age of majority.
Horizon. Not applicable.
Limits. Electoral rule, with no direct static budgetary cost: cannot be costed (the cost of registering about two additional age cohorts on the electoral rolls is negligible and has not been costed by any source). Article 414 of the Civil Code and the 1974 law are cited without online checking; the need for a constitutional revision is a doctrinal reading, not a decision.
- Constitution, texte en vigueur (Conseil constitutionnel), art. 3: « « Sont électeurs, dans les conditions déterminées par la loi, tous les nationaux français majeurs des deux sexes, jouissant de leurs droits civils et politiques. » »
- Légifrance, Code électoral, article L2: « Sont électeurs les Françaises et Français âgés de dix-huit ans accomplis, jouissant de leurs droits civils et politiques »
How to read these amounts. These are static costs and revenues, with no feedback effect, over a full year: nothing on growth, employment or the revenue that economic activity would gain or lose. A higher net cost does not on its own make a worse policy, nor net savings a better one: each programme rests on an economic model (demand-led stimulus, lower compulsory levies, consolidation of the public accounts…) that the cost schedule does not settle. GDP itself measures a volume of activity, not well-being or the usefulness of what is produced. Economic models and feedback effects.
- Pour une prospérité écologique, programme des Écologistes, p. 163. Open the document at this page.
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