In this article, I defend compulsory voting on the grounds that it reinforces the distinctive and valuable role that elections play in contemporary democracy. Some scholars have suggested that mandatory voting laws can improve government responsiveness to members of poor and marginalized groups who are less likely to vote. Critics of compulsory voting object that citizens can participate in a wide variety of ways; voting is not important enough to justify forcing people to do it. These critics neglect the importance of voting's particular role in contemporary democratic practice, though. The case for compulsory voting rests on an implicit, but widely shared, understanding of elections as special moments of mass participation that manifest the equal political authority of all citizens. The most prominent objections to mandatory voting fail to appreciate this distinctive role for voting and the way it is embedded within a broader democratic framework.

No abstract

Voting is only one of the many ways that citizens can participate in public decision making, so why does it occupy such a central place in the democratic imagination? This book provides an original answer to that question, showing precisely what is so special about how we vote in today's democracies. By presenting a holistic account of popular voting practices and where they fit into complex democratic systems, the book defends popular attitudes toward voting against radical critics and offers much-needed guidance for voting reform. Elections embody a distinctive constellation of democratic values and perform essential functions in democratic communities. Election day dramatizes the nature of democracy as a collective and individual undertaking, makes equal citizenship and individual dignity concrete and transparent, and socializes citizens into their roles as equal political agents. The book shows that fully realizing these ends depends not only on the widespread opportunity to vote but also on consistently high levels of actual turnout, and that citizens' experiences of voting matters as much as the formal properties of a voting system. And these insights are also essential for crafting and evaluating electoral reform proposals. By rethinking what citizens experience when they go to the polls, the book recovers the full value of democratic voting today.

This chapter examines the role of political parties in the practice of voting and the principles that we should use to evaluate different forms of party politics. It begins with the observation that the value of popular voting depends on the democratic character of prior agenda-setting processes. After briefly identifying some core principles of democratic agenda-setting, it defends the party system paradigm as the appropriate starting point for conceptualizing democratic agenda-setting processes. The chapter then considers some candidate models for healthy party politics. It argues that an ideal of “parties-as-mobilizers” provides the best standard for evaluating party politics and for guiding efforts to improve party systems, party organizations, and practices of partisanship.

No abstract