By Kenneth Macdonald

BBC Scotland special correspondent

Academics have questioned whether voters can understand the arguments

Should you have to pass a test before you're allowed to vote? Should you be fined if you don't go to the polling station? Or is not voting the only logical response to present day politics? As election turnouts decline, and the fallout from the expenses scandal continues, The Investigation programme on BBC Radio Scotland is asking if the system is fit for purpose - and if you are fit to vote. The United Kingdom may boast the mother of parliaments, but when it comes to electing its members our enthusiasm has been on the wane for decades. Politicians of all stripes agonise about the downturn in turnouts. Some have even flirted with the idea of Australian-style compulsory voting. 'Not worth bothering' But Professor James Mitchell of Strathclyde University's department of government says that, in certain circumstances, not voting may be the rational choice. "It may well be that, now that duty is in decline, people think rationally 'is it worthwhile voting?' "And I suspect that for at least a part of the electorate that they calculate it's just not worth bothering. "Not least because in most constituencies, even in years when you get big shifts in public opinion and a big shift in the numbers of MPS, the majority of seats just don't change hands." Elites get away with taking difficult, complex decisions because the electorate simply doesn't understand them

Lindsay Paterson

Edinburgh University But others question not the fitness of the system but of the voters themselves. Professor Gordon Graham, a Scot who teaches philosophy at Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey, questions whether every member of the electorate is up to the task of making important choices. He thinks would-be voters should have to pass a test. "We require people to have minimum skills to drive a car," he said. "We require them to be hugely educated to educate others. We require all sorts of things if they're going to give people financial or legal advice. "So how can it be that you're not required to be qualified at all to cast your vote for the state that rules everything?" Churchill said democracy was the least worst of all systems of government Unsurprisingly, you won't find any mainstream political party agreeing with that. For them the problem is getting people to the polling stations, not making them pass a test before they get in. But Professor Graham has some distinguished company: the 19th Century Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle argued that voters should have a basic level of knowledge before they were allowed to cast their ballots. Professor Lindsay Paterson of Edinburgh University rejects that idea. But he does worry that an under-educated electorate - one which has not been taught properly to evaluate political arguments - could allow the rise of dangerously populist politicians. "Elites get away with taking difficult, complex decisions because the electorate simply doesn't understand them," he said. "Think for example about the sub-prime mortgage problem. Who today understands the challenges facing the public finances? "These are enormously complex things and if you have a not properly educated electorate, then they're not in a position to understand the decisions taken by managers and other forms of elite." But Professor Paterson sees a second and even greater danger: that the elites themselves start pandering to popular prejudices. "So that instead of the kind of debates we used to get in the 19th Century, what we get now is politicians pandering to the focus group, or to the latest vox pop interviews by - dare I say it - journalists on the BBC," he said. How much should we worry? As Churchill said, democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried. On the other hand, Hitler was democratically elected. You can hear Kenneth Macdonald's Investigation on Call Kaye, at 0845 GMT on Monday 15 March



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