Introduction

Modern societies depend increasingly on participation to achieve economic efficiency, both in the marketplace and in parliament. For example, in many universities, students assign marks to their teachers to help them be more effective; and many firms, public and private, ask customers to fill in forms that rate customer's satisfaction with the service provided. In politics the main form of participation is represented by the act of voting: It is, however, a very incomplete form of participation, and the economic consequences of this limitation need to be acknowledged and better understood. This essay points to three major issues. The first is related to the lack of representation for a significant share of the population, namely children and young people. The second issue regards the economic consequences of the relationship between younger and older voters, as revealed by the multipeak surface of the joint age–income distribution. A simple way to analyze this issue is to refer to the median voter model, exploiting the implied statistical relationship between median and average income. The third issue points to the problem of low political participation as a possible cause of higher violent crime rates, higher law enforcement costs, and a lower quality of life. Possible solutions to the issues raised are simply hinted, because they need to be specific to each country: in particular, the potential benefits of new information technology need to be explored.