13NFL1-Compulsory Voting
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AFFIRMATIVE EVIDENCE
DEFINITION - COMPULSORY VOTING
COMPULSORY VOTING IS A SYSTEM WITH INCENTIVES AND PENALTIES TO INCREASE
VOTER TURNOUT.
Simon Jackman 01, [Assitant Professor and Victoria Schuck Faculty Scholar, Department of Political Science, Stanford Unviersity], "Compulsory Voting, Internet Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2001. http://jackman.stanford.edu/papers/cv.pdf Compulsory voting (CV) is a system of laws and/or norms mandating thatenfranchised citizens turnout to vote, often accompanied by (a) a system ofcompulsory voter registration and (b) penalties for noncompliance, usually finesor the denial of state-provided benefits. CV is widespread throughout LatinAmerica, but somewhat rarer among industrialized democracies.
Cross-nationalstudies find CV to bean effective mechanism for increasing turnout, by betweenseven to sixteen percentage points within-country comparisons also generallyfind that CV boosts turnout. CV is commonly thought to advantage parties of theleft (based on social- structural and demographic patterns of turnout in countrieswithout CV, and hence shift public policy in that direction also. But theseconjectures are difficult to verify, since other political and institutional variablesintervene between voter turnout, election outcomes and policy outputs. It isoften overlooked that fines and sanctions are just one aspect of CV statesemploying CV usually reciprocate by reducing the costs of turnout for itscitizens, via weekend voting, simple registration procedures, and the creationof a centralized, professional bureaucracy concerned with all aspects of electionadministration.
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