Does Compulsory Voting Lead to More Informed and Engaged Citizens? An Experimental Test

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By compelling people to vote we are likely to arouse in them an intelligent interest and to give them a political knowledge that they do not at present possess.

Arend Lijphart (1997), quoting an early Australian advocate of compulsory voting.

1.

Introduction

In his well-known presidential address to the American Political Science Association, Arend Lijphart (1997) called for compulsory voting as a solution to unequal electoral participation in the United States. In doing so, he restated the main arguments of the advocates of compulsory voting. Most importantly, compulsory voting would increase turnout in elections. Second, compulsory voting would lead to a more politically knowledgeable and engaged electorate.¹

There can be no quibble with Lijphart's first assertion, which we regard as a first-order effect of compulsory voting. The cross-sectional (Jackman, 1987; Blais and Carty, 1990; Blais and Dobrzynska, 1998; Franklin, 1996, 2004) and quasi-experimental (Hirczy, 1994) evidence for this claim is clear. Compulsory voting increases turnout in national elections on average by some 10 to 15 percentage points--and even more in regional and local elections. However, the evidence for the second-order effects of compulsory voting is much less clear, at least partly because of the difficulty of making causal claims about cross-national differences in more subjective variables like political knowledge and engagement.

We argue that an experimental approach is an appropriate way in which to address this gap in our knowledge. To this end, we conducted an experiment in the winter of 2007 in the midst of the Quebec provincial election. Our experiment required that one group of (first-time) voters complete two surveys to receive a monetary reward, while another group was also required to vote in the provincial election, that is, they faced a financial penalty if they chose to abstain from voting. We take between-group differences in knowledge, news consumption, and political discussion as measures of the second-order effects of compulsory voting. To anticipate our findings, we find little evidence of the second-order effects of compulsory voting.

In section 2, we briefly review existing knowledge on the second-order effects of compulsory voting. In doing so, we draw a connection between the lack of current evidence and the value of an experimental approach, an approach which is...