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 74 of 163
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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. From different specifications of this RDD, the effect of compulsory voting on turnout was estimated to be in the range of 17
–21 pp, which was equivalent to an effect of 27–33% increase over the turnout at the age of 70 and was statistically different from zero at less than 1% significance level. More importantly, the findings conclusively support the hypothesis that the unskilled citizens are more affected by mandatory voting than the skilled citizens. Considering the piece-wise linear probability model, the effect of the CVL for the unskilled was app) increase, while the CVL was less binding on the skilled, whose turnout increased only by 12 pp.
(17%). The estimated differential effect of the CVL across skill groups was statistically different from zero at conventional levels of significance. The results are found to be robust to a battery of checks comprising changes in time and clustering units, as well as accounting for potential health differentials. In addition to these, the results hold for the female sample and also if the age unit is months instead of years. The contribution of this paper to the literature in the field is that it employs an internally valid design to assess the effects of compulsory voting on voter turnout. The estimates of this study fall near the upper bound of the range estimated by previous (mainly cross-sectional) studies (effects of 7
–17 pp. To the best of my knowledge, I am the first to show rigorously that compulsory voting is an institution that attenuates the skill (and usually socioeconomic) bias in political participation. The economic implication of this result is highly relevant because the skilled and the unskilled prefer different policies. My results also support the common belief that populist parties are generally in favor of this kind of institution.

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