Compulsory Voting as a Way to Raise Citizen Participation in Democracies
Changing forms of political participation observed by political scientists over the past half-century undermine traditional democratic theory and practice. The vast majority of democratic theory, and deliberative democratic theory in particular, either implicitly or explicitly assumes the need for widespread citizen participation.
It requires that all citizens possess the opportunity to participate and also that they take up this opportunity. But empirical evidence gathered over the past half-century strongly suggests that many citizens do not have a meaningful opportunity to participate in the ways that many democratic theorists require, and do not participate in anything like the numbers that they believe is necessary. Rates of political participation among citizens of liberal democratic states are low and becoming more unequal; participation is becoming increasingly concentrated among those at the top end of the wealth and income distribution, and as a consequence political power and influence have also become increasingly concentrated among members of this group.
This is a problem for democratic theory and practice. Citizen participation in a democracy acts as a check on elite power. It prevents the rise of civil oligarchies and the capture of democratic institutions by privileged groups, and ensures that democratic structures are not reformed in ways which result in the systemic exclusion of nonelites over the longer term.
It is not surprising, then, that the last two decades have seen a growth in research by political scientists into the problem of low rates of political participation among citizens of liberal democratic states.
Deliberative democrats connect political philosophers working in the egalitarian tradition about the association between socio-economic and political inequality with analyses produced by political scientists about changing patterns of political participation in democracies around the world. In doing so, they infuse normative debates about the future of liberal democracy with an awareness of hard empirical data, and contribute to the wider search for solutions. Deliberative democracy is appealing to many liberal egalitarians as it folds a critique of markets, and a defence of egalitarian redistribution, into arguments for democracy. Democracy, for deliberative democrats, is not separate from social justice: social justice is required in order for democracy to function as it should. However, the case for deliberative democracy is weakened by its reliance on a conception of civil society that is not found in the contemporary liberal democratic states suffering from the most significant declines in political participation, and the most significant forms of political inequality. Theories of deliberative democracy require that individuals possess the opportunity to participate in appropriate forms of deliberation with others and that they take up this opportunity
The dominant view in the literature is that the existing research on voter turnout has established some robust patterns, that we know relatively well why turnout is higher in some countries than in others, and that the main factors that affect variations in turnout are institutional variables. My verdict is different. Many of the findings in the comparative cross-national research are not robust, and when they are, we do not have a compelling micro foundation account of the relationship. And the impact of institutional variables may be overstated. In this paper I discussed that strategies for democratic reform which emphasise wider and richer forms of citizen participation at the level of mass society, as opposed to strategies which seek to bolster representative institutions through the incorporation of complementary mechanisms (including, but not limited to) mini-publics, are more likely to entrench the social, economic, and political inequalities which characterise contemporary democracies than resolve them.
The study of voter turnout started with Powell’s award-winning book , Contemporary Democracies, which posited electoral participation as one of the three main indicators of democratic performance, and two American Political Science Review articles by Powell and Jackman.
Jackman identifies three institutions that appear to foster turnout: compulsory voting, the electoral system, and unicameralism. Other institutional variables have also been proposed. Jackman estimates that compulsory voting increases turnout by about 13 percentage points. This pattern has been confirmed by every study of turnout in western democracies, and the magnitude of the estimated impact is almost always around 10 to 15 points. “Compulsory voting increases turnout” can be construed as a well-established proposition.
This raises more questions. Must compulsory voting legislation be accompanied by sanctions in order to be efficient? What kinds of sanctions are more prone to induce recalcitrant citizens to go to the polls? How “tough” must these sanctions be? How strictly must they be enforced? The literature provides precious little to answer these questions .
In summary, we know that compulsory voting increases turnout and that its impact depends on its enforcement. But we do not know how strict that enforcement must be in order to work. We know nothing about the public’s awareness and perceptions of the law and its implementation. And there are no comparative analyses of the determinants of turnout in countries with and without compulsory voting. This is an unfortunate state of affairs. If a sense of duty is a crucial motivation for voting, most people should be predisposed to vote, and loosely enforced, light fines should be sufficient to produce a high turnout. And according to rational choice, the factors that shape the decision to vote or not to vote should be very different when there is a concrete financial cost associated with abstention.
