I think that this is a great public forum topic: it relates to a current event that will educate students on some of the nuanc
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Lesson 4.2 Day 3
| 13NFL1-Compulsory Voting Page 121 of 163 www.victorybriefs.com INCENTIVIZING VOTING IS AN ALTERNATIVE TO COMPULSORY VOTING Ben Saunders – 2009 University of Oxford, Making Voting Pay Politics. Vol. 29(2), 130 –136. Our situation can be compared to that facing Richard Titmuss, who wanted simultaneously to realise three desiderata (1) sufficient availability of blood (2) no payment for donors (3) freedom of choice (no compulsion) (Titmuss, 1970).1 These three conditions are, in fact, logically compossible if donors can be motivated by altruism to give freely without payment, and this is what happens in the UK – people are encouraged to give by what maybe termed mild moral pressure, including government advertising. It should be noted, however, that we can easily satisfy any two of these desiderata by sacrificing the third. There would be no problem, for instance, with freedom of choice and lack of payment if we did not care about blood stocks. Alternatively, we could guarantee enough blood without payment by making donation compulsory or we could avoid compulsion by paying donors incentives until people freely choose to give (or, rather, sell) – which is the general practice in the US. The present electoral situation in many democracies can be regarded as like that of UK blood donations. We want to ensure sufficient turnout, without either payment or compulsion, which we generally try to achieve through social pressure or telling people that they have amoral duty. Since this method appears to be failing, advocates of compulsory voting suggest that we abandon the injunction against compulsion – that is, that we ensure turnout by forcing people to attend the polls. The US solution to Titmuss’s trilemma, however, illustrates another possibility rather than forcing people to vote, we could incentivise them to – that is, pay people for attending the polls. This solution in fact has historical precedents. Aristotle recommended that democracies should pay people for their participation in the assembly and this was important to Athenian democracy, since the poor would otherwise not have been able to afford to attend (Aristotle, 1992, pp. 363 –4 b ff. The only mention of such a possibility that I have found in the theoretical literature on compulsory voting swiftly rejects it (Feely, 1974, p. 241), although in fact non-financial incentives have been tried in practice (Keaney and Rogers, 2006, p. 24). A financial inducement seems an obvious way of encouraging people to vote without coercion. Such selective incentives are often necessary for collective action (Olson, 1965) and can be regarded as a more direct way of offsetting the costs of voting. Finally, not only is this solution compatible with individual freedom but it may address the problem of disproportionality, because a given financial incentive is likely to be more attractive to the young and poor, thus doing more to stimulate turnout from groups currently underrepresented. ’’ Download 2 Mb. Share with your friends:
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