13NFL1-Compulsory Voting
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FOWLER’S STUDY IS MORE PLAUSIBLE BECAUSE IT ASSUMES LESS.
Anthony Fowler
– 2013 Department of Government, Harvard University. Electoral and Policy Consequences of Voter Turnout Evidence from Compulsory Voting in Australia Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 2013, 8: 159
–182. While the adoption of compulsory voting was not random, the timing of the policy does not appear to be related to changes in political, economic, or demographic factors
— a claim that I explicitly test later in this paper. Therefore, compulsory voting provides a rare opportunity to test for the effects of near-universal turnout on election outcomes and public policy. To assess the effects of compulsory voting on partisan election results, I exploit the differential timing of compulsory voting laws across Australian states with a simple difference-in-differences design. Then, in order to assess the policy consequences of compulsory voting, I employ synthetic control methods to compare changes in Australia’s pension spending overtime with changes in other comparable nations. Both of these designs require a parallel trends assumption which is extremely plausible, justified with data, and significantly weaker than the assumptions required for previous studies of the effects of near-universal turnout
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