13NFL1-Compulsory Voting
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AT CIVIC AWARENESS
COMPULSORY VOTING DO
ESN’T ACTUALLY PROMOTE CIVIC AWARENESS- IN FACT, IT
ENCOURAGES MORE UNINFORMED VOTES.
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 One criticism of CV is that it compels the participation of disinterested andhence poorly informed citizens who would otherwise abstain. A higher rate ofinvalid ballots (e.g., Tingsten 1937) and donkey ballots (where voters simplyselect the candidate at the top of the ballot) are some of the few consequencesattributable to the mobilization of citizens with low levels of political interestor sophistication. Moreover, some instances of these phenomena are protestsagainst CV itself.
Lijphart’s (1997, 10) takes a contrary position, suggesting thatCV may serve as an incentive for voters to become better informed A crossnational study by Gordon and Segura (1997) finds a small though statisticallysignificant increase in political sophistication in countries with CV, but otherwise,the evidence for CV promoting greater civic awareness is scant.
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