Should Politicians Have to Pass Competence Tests? (Your Radical Questions with David Runciman)

**Amol Rajan** (0:08)
Hello, and welcome to Your Radical Questions, where we put your questions to one of our guests. This is your chance to engage directly with the radical people we have on this podcast, and ask them about their ideas for the future.
I've still got David Runciman with me. David is honorary professor of politics at the University of Cambridge, where he taught for many years, and he's now a full-time podcaster as the host of Past, Present, Future about the history of ideas.
If you haven't heard our conversation from last Thursday, please go back and listen. It was really interesting. David set out a radical proposition that we should lower the voting age to six years old. We talked about why David thinks it's a good idea in Thursday's episode, so I'd recommend listening to that if you haven't already. But now, David is here to answer the radical questions that you've sent in. David, thank you again for joining us.

**David Runciman** (1:06)
You're very welcome. I'm looking forward to hearing what is coming my way.

**Amol Rajan** (1:11)
I wait with bated breath to find out if we have any six-year-olds contributing, but our first question comes from Sophie Cogan, who has sent us this voice note.

**Sophie Cogan** (1:20)
Hi, I'm Sophie. I'm a massive fan of David's work and past, present, future and radicality of my favorite podcasts, and I'm really looking forward to this episode. My questions are about how David's proposal deals with political knowledge and competence. Firstly, how does the proposal deal with differences in a person's understanding of politics? Could it work alongside a more aristocratic model where everyone can vote, but the votes are weighted according to political competence? In that case, six wouldn't necessarily need to be the lower age limit. Anyone could vote if they could demonstrate they understood what they were voting for.
Also, if the argument for lowering the voting age is based mainly on achieving better outcomes rather than the symbolic value of a vote, wouldn't that logic also support weighting votes by competence if doing so produce better outcomes?
I'm looking forward to hearing David's thoughts. Thank you.

**David Runciman** (2:15)
I'm going to take them in reverse order, if I may.

**Sophie Cogan** (2:17)
Go ahead.

**David Runciman** (2:19)
I don't think it is about better outcomes necessarily, partly because if you think of democracy in terms of better outcomes, you go quickly get into a line of thought that we heard a version of there, which is actually shouldn't the people who know best have more of a say? It actually moves quite quickly towards something that sometimes gets called technocracy or an epistocratic, that's the word that was used there, which means a knowledge-based and it is, frankly, elite-based version of politics. I think it's an excellent question because it does highlight precisely the way in which these ideas are intention. But the ideas that are intention are universal suffrage and optimal outcomes.
Some people argue in the long run, universal suffrage produces optimal outcomes.
I don't think many people believe you can guarantee every election. It's the best outcome because so many people were voting. Even if it's true in the long run, I think it's true in the long run not because the people are becoming wiser and better informed, but non-democratic systems fall into the hands of charlatans, crooks and monsters. Eventually, if you get stuck with one of them, you're screwed. The great thing about democracies is we can get rid of the people who are doing it badly for us.

**Amol Rajan** (3:42)
Are there any democracies at the moment who have a more epistocratic model? Now, I've learnt this new fancy word. I want to use it.

**David Runciman** (3:51)
I mean, there is a political system that is more epistocratic than ours and that's the Chinese political system for sure in that it prioritizes certain kinds of expertise.
The easiest way to illustrate that is that China is basically run by engineers and Western systems are run by a mix of, well, if you take Britain, it's sort of a mix of people who have been career politicians, who worked in think tanks, who've worked for NGOs, but there are often quite a few lawyers and so on. And an engineered society is very different from a well-meaning NGO-ish legal sort of economists society.

**Amol Rajan** (4:28)
And the argument here, as opposed to it being politicians as such being put in place because of their competence, the suggestion is people should be able to vote by proving political competence, which would not mean universal suffrage at all, would it?

**David Runciman** (4:47)
Or it could mean universal suffrage, but then weighted voting according to competence.