The concept of “compulsory voting” is something we don’t often think about as Americans. It seems like a strange and foreign concept here despite 26 relatively well known countries in the world having such policies in their legal codes (including over half of South America, several European nations, and Australia). But it’s important to look at what compulsory voting actually means, especially for the purpose of this study. In my Honors Thesis, I decided to define compulsory voting as an enforced legal obligation within a country to vote in at least national elections, if not local ones too. Level of punishment levied for not voting often differs based on the country, but that difference was not observed in this study for the sake of simplicity.
But what is there to study about compulsory voting? Anyone with Google can tell you what it does: it increases voter turnout. And that is true, but what does that increased turnout lead to? That’s where my hypothesis and theory came from. I hypothesized that compulsory voting actually increases many other forms of political participation beyond just voter turnout. I pulled this general idea from research done by Jill Sheppard (2015) who found that compulsory voting led to more parity in political knowledge between socio-economic classes. Then, taking the generally held concept by political scientists that those who engage frequently with their political systems have more influence over it, led me to believe that these newly politically informed citizens would have a more firm grasp on this concept, and therefore work to change their country through increased political activity.
However, existing literature on this subject is scant. One study only done with voters in Austria found very little significant correlation between compulsory voting and political participation, only finding a small negative one between compulsory voting and likelihood to discuss politics (Gaebler et al., 2019). Lundell (2012) looked at a similar topic too, compulsory voting’s effect on civic engagement, and found an overall negative relationship between the two. But civic engagement is not equal to political engagement. In fact, out of Lundell’s ten variables in his civic engagement index, only two could be seen as relevant to political participation, membership in a labor union and membership in a political party.
My study of the effects of compulsory voting on political participation was done using data from the World Value Survey Wave 7, which collected survey results on hundreds of varying questions from participants in 65 countries. The survey questions I took out to determine political participation were how likely the respondent is to sign a petition, join a boycott, attend a lawful demonstration, join unofficial strikes, donate to a political group or campaign, contact a government official, encourage others to take political action, and encourage others to vote. And the ones for political knowledge were likelihood to search for political topics online, interest in politics, and how often politics are discussed with friends. I then ran a basic linear regression between compulsory voting and each of the WVS variables and found several interesting results.
First, compulsory voting seemed to have very little correlation to any of my studied forms of political participation. The only one it had an significant relation to was likelihood to participate in a boycott, which was negative. For those related to political knowledge, political discussion varied negatively with compulsory voting, implying that respondents in countries with those policies are less likely to talk about politics. While the results were not conclusive, there are several possible explanations that deserve further research. One possibility it that boycotting (at least in America) is more associated with displeasure in a government or international body, think the Montgomery Bus Boycott or an Olympic Boycott. So, a decrease in likelihood to boycott could mean more trust in the government, although this increased trust could be the result of any number of factors. I believe a decrease in political discussion would most likely result from a lack of interest in politics, which could simply be explained by people not enjoying being forced to engage in it. It’s simple human nature to rebel against authority, and if the central government is forcing someone to come into contact with politics, they may lose interest in it or never gain interest to begin with. As expected, there was also a strong, positive correlation between compulsory voting and voter turnout.
Although my hypothesis was seemingly proven incorrect, I don’t think the potential for research on this topic is even close to done. For one, my study focused on political participation and had political knowledge as a secondary set of variables. More studies solely analyzing the impacts high voter turnout has on other forms of political engagement would be very interesting, at the moment I’ve only found one out there. And, as I mentioned earlier, different severities of punishment for noncompliance with compulsory voting policies had to be removed from my study since the statistical skills to include an ordinal variable as my IV were beyond me. So, seeing research on how that affects these numbers would be fascinating.
Matthew McClarnon is a senior is a senior in the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs majoring in Law and Public Policy with a minor in International Economics.
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