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

13NFL1-Compulsory Voting
Page 141 of 163
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EVEN IF POLITICAL PARTICIPATION IS INTRINSICALLY VALUABLE, IT DOES NOT
FOLLOW THAT ALL ELECTORAL PARTICIPATION IS VALUABLE
Annabelle Lever Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method London School of Economics and Political Science, Compulsory Voting A Criminal Perspective
British Journal of
Political Science
(December, 2008). Still, from the fact that our interests in self-government are sufficiently important to impose moral and legal duties on others, it does not follow that we have duties to develop and exercise our political capacities in any particular way. As a general matter, democracies provide a variety of arenas and ways in which we can act collectively as citizens, and develop our abilities to define and pursue collective, as well as personal, interests. The more participatory our democracy, the more such opportunities there will be
– in business, in culture, sport and the arts, in education, healthcare, public administration, law, the military. Indeed, feminists have insisted that families, if they are just, are both schools and models of democracy, providing some of our most compelling experiences of mutuality, solidarity and responsibility, as well as some of the greatest challenges to our ideals of freedom, equality and deliberation So, while we often associate self- government with engagement in legislative politics, it is an important fact about democracies that there are opportunities for public responsibility, and for collective choice and action in all areas of life, and these are in principle as capable of developing and expressing our capacities for self- government as more familiar forms of politics. One difficulty with the idea that voting should be compulsory, therefore, is that its importance to democratic political ideals is uncertain, even on representative conceptions of democracy. Elections in representative democracies help to ensure that, of the different people who may want to hold political office and to act on our behalf, the ones that are chosen are the ones we judge best for the task. It does not follow, however, that we think the selection of these candidates more important than other ways of defining and pursuing collective interests. Duly elected representatives are entitled to pass laws on our behalf, to undo those that have been made, to appoint people to act for us, to enforce collectively binding decisions and soon. But important though these tasks are, it does they are not obviously more important than other forms of collective choice and action, whether administrative, judicial, executive or benevolent

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