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 90 of 163 www.victorybriefs.com A2 UNINFORMED VOTERS EMPIRICAL LITERATURE THAT CONCLUDES MANDATORY VOTING PROMOTES AN UNINFORMED ELECTORATE SUFFERS FROM SEVERE METHODOLOGICAL FLAWS. OBSERVATIONAL STUDIES ARE ESPECIALLY TROUBLING. Victoria Anne Shineman Visiting Scholar, Center for the Study of Democratic Politics Princeton University – 2010. Compulsory Voting as Compulsory Balloting How Mandatory Balloting Laws Increase Informed Voting Without Increasing Uninformed Voting Working Paper, Princeton University. Overall, the empirical literature suggests that mandatory voting increases the average information level in the population, but decreases the average information level in the electorate. If true, this would introduce a conflict of interest for scholars who value both an informed population and an informed electorate. However, all of these findings are based on observational data or hypothetical behavior. Observational studies have difficulty in properly identifying a causal effect. It is difficult to make meaningful comparisons of political information across political systems. Furthermore, mandatory balloting rules are not randomly assigned in real- world elections, introducing significant concerns regarding baseline bias. The hypothetical studies are also limited with regard to causal inference. Respondents notoriously misreport their actual voting behavior, so reports of hypothetical voting behavior should be analyzed with great caution (see Jackman 1999). Even if respondents try to be sincere, reporting hypothetical behavior is not the same thing as making areal choice. For example, Morton and Williams (2010, p. 359) cite several studies demonstrating that hypothetical choices differ significantly from choices made in settings where actions are incentivized with real consequences. Additionally, this method of measurement cannot account for the possibility that CV might be increasing information. If information is endogenous to the voting system, one’s level of information under one voting system cannot be a reliable estimate for that person’s counterfactual level of information under the other system. Download 2 Mb. Share with your friends:
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