In the United Kingdom, Keir Starmer's Labour government has announced plans to lower the voting age from 18 to 16 for all future elections, in a bid to "modernise democracy". But for the handful of other countries who have made the move, results have been mixed.
On 17 July, the UK government announced a major overhaul of the country's electorate.
"Today we’re delivering on our promise to give 16 and 17-year-olds the right to vote," Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner posted on X, adding: "Young people already contribute to society by working, paying taxes and serving in the military. It's only right they can have a say on the issues that affect them."
Once ratified by parliament – which is expected to pass it easily – the measure will allow those aged 16 and 17 to vote in all elections, including the next general election scheduled for 2029. Official data estimates this will result in an additional 1.6 million voters.
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has said that lowering the voting age from 18 – a measure which was promised in Labour's manifesto prior to their election in 2024 – will make elections and their results fairer for young people.
"I think it's really important that 16 and 17-year-olds have the vote, because they are old enough to go out to work, they are old enough to pay taxes," he told ITV News. "And I think if you pay in, you should have the opportunity to say what you want your money spent on."
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The move will see the UK join a small but growing group of countries.
In the European Union, Belgium lowered its voting age to 16 for last year's European election, as did Germany, where 16-year-olds have been able to vote in municipal elections in some states since the mid 1990s – although on the national level the voting age remains 18.
In Austria, the voting age for all elections – local, national and European – has been set at 16 since 2007, as it has in Malta since 2018.
Greece split the difference and lowered its voting age to 17 in 2016. Cyprus lowered its voting age for all elections to 17 in May this year, ahead of its 2028 presidential election.
Elsewhere in the world, 16-year-olds can vote in Cuba, Nicaragua, Argentina, Ecuador and Brazil. Seventeen-year-olds can head to the polls in East Timor, Indonesia, Israel and North Korea.
Who stands to gain?
In the UK, as in several other countries where the issue is being debated, the idea behind the reform is to combat abstention. At last year's UK general election, turnout was 59.7 percent – the lowest since 2001.
"There is also an unspoken belief among many in [the left-wing] Labour [party] that the change may benefit the left, given that younger people have historically tended to be more left wing," the UK's Guardian newspaper reports.
This is far from a given, however, as the paper reports, citing a poll conducted for ITV News of 500 16 and 17-year-olds, which showed that while Labour did indeed have the highest support among them, at 33 percent, the second most popular party was the right-wing populist Reform UK, led by Nigel Farage – on 20 percent.
Farage, nonetheless, says he is against the move "even though we get lots of [young people's] votes". He told ITV News that people should not be able to vote in an election unless they can stand as a candidate – the minimum age for which is 18 in the UK.
Professor of politics at Glasgow's Strathclyde University and polling expert Sir John Curtice told the BBC he believes the Green Party is the most likely to benefit from the lowering of the voting age.
He added that young people are least likely to vote for the Conservative Party and Reform UK, and most likely to vote for the Greens, the Scottish National Party (SNP) or Labour – although the change has "maybe come too late for Labour to benefit from".
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However, the election of far-right presidents Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil in 2018 and Javier Milei in Argentina in 2023, as well as the historic victory of the far-right Freedom Party of Austria in the country's 2024 general election, suggest the correlation of young voters with liberal politics is not necessarily an automatic one.
Regardless of their voting intentions, a report published by the Council of Europe in 2022 supports the idea that lowering the voting age can breathe new life into the democratic process – in part by increasing turnout.
"Results from Austria show that the turnout of 16 and 17-year-olds is in fact higher than the turnout of older first time voters, and it is nearly as high as the overall turnout," the report notes. The abstention rate in Austria's parliamentary elections last September was just 25.1 percent.
In comparison, in France 33.3 percent of voters failed to go to the polls following the dissolution of the National Assembly by Emmanuel Macron in the aftermath of the European elections last year.
Scotland's 2014 independence referendum, the first vote in the country in which 16-year-olds were eligible to participate, had the highest turnout of any referendum or election in UK history – at 84.6 percent.
Lessons from Scotland
The expansion of the electorate would put all four of the nations that make up the UK on an equal footing, given that 16 and 17-year-olds in Scotland and Wales already have the right to vote in elections to their devolved national parliaments.
Unlike in the rest of the UK, in Scotland – which has a separate legal system – 16 is the age of majority. Scots of that age are able to marry, enter into contracts and legal agreements and can be tried in adult courts.
In March 2013, 18 months before the independence referendum when the SNP proposed the legislation to lower the participation age for the vote, then-Deputy First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said: "No one has a bigger stake in the future of our country than today's young people."
A new study by the University of Edinburgh and the University of Sheffield would suggest that young people in Scotland were equally enthusiastic about their enfranchisement. it found that 16 and 17-year-olds were more likely to vote in the referendum than Scots aged between 18 and 24.
The Council of Europe's examination of the 2014 referendum in its 2022 report backs this up, with its authors noting the "high levels of enthusiasm" among Scots aged 16-17, as demonstrated by figures showing that "109,593 of under-18s registered and 75 percent claimed to have voted".
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It also noted another significant statistic – that "97 percent of those 16-17-year olds who reported having voted said that they would vote again in future elections and referendums".
These positive longer-term outcomes have been cited by campaigners in favour of lowering voter ages, and are borne out by the joint Edinburgh and Sheffield study.
It found that people who take part in their first election aged 16 or 17 are indeed more likely to turn out to vote in future elections than those who first voted at the age of 18.
The study used data collected from 863 young people in Scotland to investigate the effects of voting for the first time at 16 or 17 on the political behaviour of young people aged up to 24, examining turnouts for the 2021 Scottish Parliament elections.
"Scotland has maintained a boost in electoral engagement among first-time voters enfranchised at 16 or 17. Seven years after the initial lowering of the voting age in Scotland, we observe that young people who benefitted from [this] were more likely to turn out to vote in the 2021 Scottish Parliament elections than young people who were first eligible to vote in an election aged 18 or older," it found.
Almost 80 percent of those who were able to vote aged 16 or 17 voted in the 2021 Scottish elections, compared with around 50 percent of those who cast their first vote at 18.
"This suggests a lasting positive effect of being allowed to vote from 16 on young people’s voter turnout as they grow up," the study concluded.
Or, as the Council of Europe report phrased it: "Those who start as a voter, stay a voter."
This article was partially adapted from the original version in French.
