13NFL1-Compulsory Voting Page 130 of 163 www.victorybriefs.com COMPULSORY VOTING DOES NOT GIVE ANY PARTY AN ELECTORAL ADVANTAGE. Sarah Birch Reader in Politics at the University of Essex, The case for compulsory voting Public Policy Research , March-May (2009), pp. 21-27. One of the beauties of this solution is that it affects all political parties equally. Though compulsory turnout has been touted most frequently by voices in the Labour party, there is little reason to believe that Labour would benefit significantly from an increase in electoral participation (Bernhagen and Marsh 2007, Fisher 2007). Comparative data also suggests that there is no particular partisan advantage associated with making electoral participation mandatory nor does this institution tend to favour minor extremist parties, as is sometimes alleged (Birch 2009).
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