Abstract
Compulsory voting laws have consistently been demonstrated to boost electoral participation. Despite the widespread presence of compulsory voting and the significant impact these laws appear to have on voting behavior, surprisingly little effort has been devoted to analyzing how mandatory voting alters the decision-making calculus of individual voters in these systems. Moreover, studies that investigate the influence of compulsory voting laws on electoral participation generally treat these policies monolithically, with scant attention to the nuances that differentiate mandatory voting laws across systems and to their consequences for voting rates. Analyses that explicitly and empirically examine the effects of penalties and enforcement are surprisingly rare. This study aims to fill that void by adapting rational choice models of participation in elections for compulsory voting systems. I find that the level of penalties countries impose for non-compliance and the degree of penalty enforcement impact turnout rates. Voters in mandatory voting systems abstain least when both the penalties and the likelihood of enforcement are high, and abstain most when both meaningless.
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Notes
Assessments of the degree of enforcement are obtained for International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) (2001). See details below.
For simplicity, I assume the costs of abstention (C NV ) always exceeds the costs of voting (C V ) (C NV > C V ) in all compulsory voting systems that impose formal sanction for non-voters. Clearly, there may be instances in which this assumption may be an oversimplification, but these are assumed to be rare.
The analyses that follow are restricted to countries classified as democracies for the period of the study by Cheibub and Gandhi (2004). Compulsory voting countries excluded: Egypt, Fiji, Gabon, Paraguay, Peru, and Singapore. Mexico classified as democracy since 2000.
The period of the 1990s is utilized in the study because details about compulsory voting practices, with respect to levels of sanctions and enforcement, were consistently available for this period.
Vanhanen (2000) provides data through 1998. The supplemental data (through 1999) used in this study were compiled and made available by Vanhanen online athttp://new.prio.no/CSCW-Datasets/Data-on-Governance/The-Polyarchy-dataset/. (Accessed 1 February 2007).
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Acknowledgments
The author is grateful to the discussant and participants at the Public Choice Society meeting and to the editors and anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and recommendations. The author is also indebted to Matthew Golder, Joseph Bafumi, Catherine Hafer, Daniel Bergan, Jose Aleman, Robert Erikson, and Shigeo Hirano for valuable suggestions.
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An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2005 Annual Meeting of the Public Choice Society in New Orleans, LA, USA.
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Panagopoulos, C. The Calculus of Voting in Compulsory Voting Systems. Polit Behav 30, 455–467 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-008-9058-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-008-9058-9