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 73 of 163
www.victorybriefs.com
COMPULSORY VOTING INCREASES TURNOUT BY AROUND 30% AND SPECIFICALLY
IMPROVES THE REPRESENTATION OF UNSKILLED WORKERS.
Laura Jaitman
– 2013. Department of Economics, University College London. The causal effect of compulsory voting laws on turnout Does skill matter Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 92, 79
–93. Table 2 shows that the effect of the CVL on voter turnout at the age of 70 was around 18 pp.
(28%). This jump is in the narrow range of 17
–21 pp, depending on the specification, which is equal to a 27
–33% increase in voting turnout and is statistically different from zero at less than
1% significance level. The preferred specification is the piece-wise linear polynomial in column III, which in the light of Fig. 1 and the high significance of its estimated parameters, provides the best fit to the data. The result from this specification shows that if voting would continue to be compulsory, the probability of voting by those aged 70 would increase by 28%. The increase is close to the upper limit of the range in the literature (mostly cross-sectional) that suggests a positive effect of 7
–17 pp. of CVLs. The results also hold for the quadratic piece-wise model column IV. In the first (second) column of Table 2, I report the result of the mean difference estimation considering the cohorts of persons aged 69 and 70 (65
–74), or equivalently a kernel regression using rectangular kernel with bandwidth equal to 1 (5). As the turnout of those older than 70 showed a decreasing trend, the estimate for the effect is 33% in the second column, higher than the 28% in the first column. If the downward trend in turnout conditioned by age, were to be purely because of inducement by the law, then this result would suggest that there is an initial jump and then a lag in the effect of the law. Some hypothetical reasons could be that there were some people, who got adapted later to the relief from the sanction (persistence of voting habit, or that other (younger) members of the household still had to vote and hence they joined them in the activity despite being older than 70. The first column can also be interpreted as a check of the third (preferred) model, given that the first one does not present the potential problem of having clustered standard errors with a small number of clusters (10 cohorts. Table 3 shows the estimates of the effect of the CVL across skill groups. According to the third preferred) model, the unskilled citizens were affected by the law twice as much as the skilled citizens were affected. Because of the CVL, turnout by the unskilled increased by 22 pp. (38%), and turnout by the skilled only by 12 pp. (17%). The increase in turnout in skilled citizens is lower possibly because the CVL was less binding for them as the weight of their civic duty component in their voting equation might have been larger than for the unskilled. The estimated difference in the effect across skill groups was statistically different from zero at 1.8% significance level This result suggests that compulsory voting is an institution that attenuates the skill (and usually socioeconomic) bias in political participation. It also offers econometrically supported arguments in favor of the common thought that populist parties prefer this kind of institution. To further investigate the economic implication of the results, I performed across- sectional estimation at voting-desk unit, regressing the proportion of votes to the right-wing party per desk on the proportion of voluntary voters and controls (skill level of the desk and neighborhood. I obtained a positive correlation between the proportion of voluntary voters and votes to the right-wing party This suggests that the voluntary voters and nonvoters (skilled and unskilled) differ in their political preferences and that the CVL has important implications in the economic policies applied trade policy, redistribution, unionization of the labor market among others. CVLs shape the electorate and change the winning platform as the composition of the electorate changes with the law.

Download 2 Mb.

Share with your friends: