Claudio Lopez-Guerra, “Democracy and Disenfranchisement: The Morality of Electoral Exclusions” (Oxford UP, 2014)

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast · Dec 1, 2014 · 1h 6m

Modern democracy is build around a collection of moral and political commitments. Among the most familiar and central of these concern voting. It is commonly held that legitimate government requires a system of universal suffrage. Yet, democrats tend to hold that certain exclusions are permissible. For example, it is commonly thought that children and the mentally impaired may justifiably be disenfranchised. We also tend to think that the disenfranchisement of felons and non-citizen residents is permissible. Indeed, these exclusion are often thought to be consistent with universal suffrage…