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 33 of 163 www.victorybriefs.com find a sitter for children, and so forth and soon Costas Panagopoulos 21 reviewed all of the data and concluded that people will only go to vote when the penalties are very harsh A reasonable explanation for nonvoting in compulsory systems where abstention is more costly that participation is that voters calculate the probability of sanction enforcement to below. This suggests abstention maybe a rational decision in these systems, and this study provides some evidence that voters behave as such in countries that mandate voting. Voters in these systems abstain least when both the penalties and the likelihood of enforcement are high, and abstain most when neither penalties nor enforcement levels are meaningful. From a public policy point of view, this study suggests that compulsory voting countries that seriously wish to deter abstention should impose high sanctions for noncompliance and enforce these sanctions strictly. Sanctions that are largely symbolic and enforcement that is effectively nonexistent are unlikely to yield enhanced turnout. In fact, the enhanced turnout may not even be more democratic at all. That is, some research suggests that in spite of increased turnout, the claim that a more democratic result is reflected by the outcome is dubious. Keith Jakee and Guang-Zhen Sun 22 researched voting from both expressivist and information based lenses to assess the degree to which outcomes were altered in both compulsory and voluntary contexts, their findings are suggestive that we may not be able to oversimplify large compelled turnout with democratic growth Contrary to some recent assertions, we show that if we take an expressive view of the voting act and consider the role of information on that act, an increase in electoral turnout alone does not necessarily lead to a superior aggregate electoral outcome. From our perspective, the decision to vote is a function of the intensity of the individual's preferences over the very act of voting itself and the extent to which the individual is confident in her understanding of the world and the particular electoral context. We therefore argue that the unexamined assumption that forcing citizens to vote will make them unambiguously more interested in, and informed about, the political process is, at least at present, untenable. 21 Panagopoulos, Costas. The Calculus of Voting in Compulsory Voting Systems Political Behavior, Vol. 30, No. 4 (Dec, 2008), pp. 455-467. JSTOR. 22 Keith Jakee and Guang- Zhen Sun. Is Compulsory Voting More Democratic Public Choice , Vol. 129, No. 1/2 (Oct, 2006), pp. 61-75. JSTOR. |