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Right to Vote and the Politics of Recognition

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  • Pablo Marshall
Pablo Marshall
Facultad de Ciencias Jurídicas y Sociales, Universidad Austral de Chile, Valdivia, Chile. / Núcleo Milenio Estudios en Discapacidad y Ciudadanía, Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo, Chile.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36446/af.e1393

Published 2026-08-31

Keywords

  • Sufragio,
  • Reconocimiento,
  • Igualdad,
  • Menores de edad,
  • Personas privadas de libertad,
  • Personas con discapacidad intelectual
    • ...More
    Less
  • Suffrage,
  • Recognition,
  • Equality,
  • Minors,
  • Persons Deprived of Liberty,
  • Persons with Intellectual Disabilities
    • ...More
    Less
Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Abstract

The article seeks to identify the utility of the recognition approach for a discussion about the importance of the right to suffrage that goes beyond the reference to the struggle of social and political movements for the expansion of suffrage during the 19th and 20th centuries. It emphasizes the reference to certain characteristics of the right to suffrage that allow understanding it as a particularly valuable right for the political theory of recognition and answers the question of whether the theory of recognition allows understanding undervalued aspects of the right to suffrage. This connection between recognition and suffrage is explored through the formulation of the idea of the right to suffrage as a special instrument of recognition, thus providing a conceptual basis to analyze some of the most common forms of electoral exclusion in contemporary representative democracies. I focus on discussing the premise that the exclusion from universal suffrage constitutes a lack of recognition of autonomy or a lack of respect associated with the equal dignity of the person as a citizen. For this purpose, I use the example of the electoral exclusion of persons deprived of liberty, persons with intellectual disabilities, and minors.

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