13NFL1-Compulsory Voting Page 91 of 163 www.victorybriefs.com COMPULSORY VOTING LAWS ACTUALLY INCREASE INFORMED VOTING. 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. Results
– Hypothesis 1: Moving from voluntary balloting to compulsory balloting does not increase uninformed voting. The first hypothesis argues that compulsory balloting will not increase uninformed voting.
Specifically, the CB Model predicts that uninformed voting will never happen under either system. To test this prediction, I compare uninformed voting across the VB and CB treatments. Table 2 presents the
frequency of uninformed voting, sorted by treatment type. The exact point predictions of the model are not realized. Across all treatments, subjects cast uninformed votes 1.55% of the time. This occurred 2.50% of
the time in VB treatments and 1.34% of the time in CB treatments. The frequency of uninformed voting was significantly larger than zero in all three treatment categories (p < 0.0014). However, in response to concerns that
CB penalties might increase uninformed voting, the data indicates this is not the case.
Uninformed voting actually occurred 1.16%
more often under VB than it did under CB, and the difference is marginally significant (p = 0.054).
