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 65 of 163
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REMOVING COMPULSORY VOTING SHARPLY INCREASES INCOME INEQUALITY
–
RECENT STUDIES OF VENEZUELAN REFORMS PROVE.
John M. Carey and
Yusaku Horiuchi
– 2013. Carey – Dartmouth Social Sciences Professor, Govt Dept Chair Horiuchi – Dartmouth Associate Professor. Compulsory Voting and Income Inequality Prepared fora seminar on Latin American Politics at Harvard University and a seminar in the Department of Government at Dartmouth. The left panel shows the trajectory of net Gini coefficient for Venezuela (the black line) and synthetic Venezuela (the gray line. As expected, it shows that the level of inequality was similar between the factual and counterfactual cases until 1993 but the level of income inequality sharply increased only for the factual case where compulsory voting was abolished. They continue In sum, all these results suggest that the removal of legal sanctions for nonvoting in Venezuela in 1993 fueled the observed increase in income equality after 1993. But we are also obliged to ask whether the political history of the case is consistent with the theory that motivates our analysis, and with the inferences that follow from it. They conclude For matters of inference, keeping the issue of redistribution out of debates over compulsory voting has its
methodological
advantages. Specifically, as we have argued, the apparent
absence
of redistributive motivations for the Venezuelan reform in 1993 increases the validity of the synthetic control method we employ in this paper to estimate the reform’s unintended impact on economic inequality. Our results, however, suggest that from a normative perspective, questions of inequality and redistribution belong at the center of these debates. The Venezuelan results suggest that ending compulsory voting, and the subsequent drop-off in electoral participation, contributed to increasing economic inequality in the s above levels Venezuelans would otherwise have experienced.

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