Compulsory voting and political participation: Empirical evidence from Austria

Abstract

We examine whether compulsory voting influences political participation as measured by voter turnout, invalid voting, political interest, confidence in parliament, and party membership. In Austria, some states temporarily introduced compulsory voting in national elections. We investigate border municipalities across two states which differ in compulsory voting legislation using a difference-indifferences approach. The results show that compulsory voting increased voter turnout by 3.5 percentage points but we do not find long-run effects. Once compulsory voting was abolished, voter turnout returned to pre-compulsory voting levels. Microdata evidence suggests that compulsory voting tends to crowd out intrinsic motivation for political participation which may explain why compulsory voting is not found to be habit-forming.

Political efficacy and the persistence of turnout shocks

“…However, the empirical literature struggles with identifying underlying mechanisms of persistence. Rather, most of the existing literature that studies turnout shocks (Bechtel, Hangartner, & Schmid, 2018;Fujiwara, Meng, & Vogl, 2016;Gaebler, Potrafke, & Rösel, F., 2020;Gerber et al, 2003;Meredith, 2009a) attributes its findings to the existence or absence of habit formation. Because this paper finds evidence for the political efficacy channel, it indicates that turnout persistence might well be explained by mechanisms that are inconsistent with habit formation.…”

Where is the class bias attenuation? The consequences of adopting compulsory voting in Austria-Hungary in 1907

“…These are rare opportunities because only a handful of countries provide any subnational variation in CV adoption. Only three such contexts have been identified so far: post-1945 Austria (Hirczy, 1994;Ferwerda, 2014;Hoffman et al, 2017;Gäbler et al, 2020), Switzerland (Singh, 2015;Bechtel et al, 2016), and Australia (Fowler, 2013). This paper follows this last research tradition and examines a fourth case in which CV was adopted in some subnational units but not othersthe Cisleithanian part of Austria-Hungary in 1907 and.…”

“…First, comparable data from earlier election waves allows to leverage a difference-in-differences (DiD) approach to estimating the causal effect of CV adoption on some dependent variables. This is the hallmark of studies studying the subnational adoption of CV (Fowler, 2013;Ferwerda, 2014;Bechtel et al, 2016;Hoffman et al, 2017;Gäbler et al, 2020). As the DiD design presupposes a parallel trends assumption (that trends in the dependent variable in the control and treatment groups would be the same in the absence of the treatment), other research on the effects of CV has utilized the synthetic control method that relaxes this assumption (Carey and Horiuchi, 2017;Bechtel et al, 2018;Singh, 2019b;Feitosa et al, 2020).…”

Should Waste Separation Be Mandatory? A Study on Public’s Response to the Policies in China

“…Gaebler et al [6] pointed out that rigid policies are not conducive to the cultivation of public habits in the long run; on the contrary, it is easy to lead to a backlash of antagonistic behavior after the disappearance of the system. On this basis, a flexible environmental policy, which is opposite to the rigid environmental policy, has been proposed by some scholars.…”