Is compulsory voting more democratic?

Abstract

Lijphart (1997) endorses compulsory voting as a means to increase voter turnout. Considering the likely effects of the role of information (including its costs) on the decision to vote and taking an expressive view of voting, however, compels us to investigate two unexamined claims by such advocates: (i) that individuals are transformed by forcing them to vote, and (ii) that a compulsory electoral outcome is a more accurate reflection of community preferences.We argue that compelling those who are not particularly interested in, or informed about, the political process to vote increases the proportion of random votes and we show that under simple majority rule, compulsory voting may violate the Pareto principle; the less popular candidate is more likely to be elected. Our results cast doubt on the ”miracle of aggregation“ argument, which optimistically concludes that as long as uninformed votes are not systematically biased, they will have no effect on voting outcomes. We also briefly consider how information cascades can exacerbate this problem. Copyright Springer Science + Business Media, Inc. 2006

Political and Social Dimensions of Civic Engagement: The Impact of Compulsory Community Service

“…According to Lijphart (1997), individuals who are forced to vote will display increased interest, an increased willingness to bear the costs of staying informed, and, as more informed voters, will do a greater service to the polity as a whole, though empirical evidence to support this claim is often lacking (Loewen, Milner, and Hicks 2008). Jakee and Sun (2006, 64) note, for example, that no one has proved that mandating an individual to perform particular civic acts “transforms” the individual sufficiently to the point that future engagement becomes desirable to that person: “the transformative process is merely assumed.” Equally relevant for our purposes, there is scant research investigating whether such a “transformation” would survive a removal of the requirement to participate 2 . The compulsory service literature directs most of its attention to this question.…”

The Case for Nil Votes: Voter Behavior Under Asymmetric Information in Compulsory and Voluntary Voting Systems

“…Börgers (2004) shows in a model of costly voting with private values that voluntary voting strongly Pareto-dominates compulsory voting. More relatedly, Jakee and Sun (2006) show in an informational voting model that compulsory voting can introduce noise in the election outcome by forcing uninformed voters to vote (as opposed to our paper, they do not consider nil or invalid votes, or psychological costs of not voting). Krishna and Morgan (2012) show in the context of informational voting with similarly informed voters that when voting is costless, voluntary voting is welfare superior to compulsory voting.…”

The Distinctive Value of Elections and the Case for Compulsory Voting

“…Earlier, I cited increased descriptive legitimacy as a likely benefit of mandatory voting, but some critics deny that increased descriptive legitimacy is actually a valuable outcome to pursue. Pointing to the historical use of compulsory voting in authoritarian regimes, they argue that mandatory voting can be used to create a false veneer of legitimacy in regimes that are not, in fact, legitimate (see, e.g., Jakee and Sun , 64). Some critics also worry that even in democratic regimes, compulsory voting may generate political complacency and discourage citizens from confronting and correcting serious flaws in their political systems (Brennan in Brennan and Hill , 49–50).…”

“…Critics argue that there is no reason to value government responsiveness to the uninformed or arbitrary votes of those who are not politically engaged enough to vote in a voluntary system. In fact, critics argue, adding more uninformed voters into the electorate might lead to electoral results that are even less representative of public opinion than results from low‐turnout elections (Brennan in Brennan and Hill , 43–45; Jakee and Sun , 67–69; Saunders , 72).…”