13NFL1-Compulsory Voting Page 20 of 163 www.victorybriefs.com (a) what is consistent with the ideal type of democracy, or the ideals that all democracies ought to be striving for orb) what is consistent with the way that democracies actually work right now. The b) route is significant because the way democracies work now maybe different than how their ideals say they ought to behave. Of particular interest here might be the writing of Chantal Mouffe, famous for developing the idea of radical democracy a position I’ll talk about a little bit later The point being, compulsory voting might be consistent with the identity of an ideal democracy but not democracies as they actually exist now, or vice versa. If you setup this issue on the framework well, you can specify and narrow the ground available on both sides in away that is advantageous to you (and whether it is advantageous will be determined by your determination of the argument and evidence on both sides. The Resolution as a Question of Morality The opposing framework argument would be that we should analyze whether making voting compulsory violates universal moral obligations. This would allow you to make arguments from moral frameworks such as utilitarianism, deontology, contractarianism, etc. There are several routes to arguing that this is the proper interpretation of the resolution. You could argue that moral obligations ought not change based on the situation or actor, and so voting ought to be evaluated for its moral merits independent of the actor. Or, you could hijack a framework that says that we should only care about whether compulsory voting is consistent with democratic principles by saying that deontology/utility/contractarianism/whatever IS the most consistent with democratic principles, and then proceed from there. A successful framework of this sort would be well-served by having both levels of justification.