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 67 of 163 www.victorybriefs.com PREVIOUS STUDIES SUFFER FROM SEVERE LIMITATIONS. Anthony Fowler – 2013 Department of Government, Harvard University. Electoral and Policy Consequences of Voter Turnout Evidence from Compulsory Voting in Australia Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 2013, 8: 159 –182. Previous attempts to address this question suffer from methodological problems. Correlations between turnout and various outcomes lack a causal interpretation because confounding variables influence both turnout and the outcomes of interest and the outcomes of interest may influence voter turnout. Comparisons of voters and nonvoters within an electorate also suffer from the possibility of confounding variables or systematic measurement error in surveys. Previous quasi-experimental approaches lack external validity because the subset of voters influenced by the quasi-experiment is unrepresentative of all nonvoters. In short, previous research has failed to answer the counterfactual question of interest. Ina democracy with voluntary voting, researchers have been unable to determine the effects of near-universal turnout. The analysis presented here largely overcomes the problems of previous studies. The timing of the introduction of compulsory voting indifferent Australian states appears to be exogenous to partisan attitudes and other political events, so difference-in-differences methods can estimate the causal effects of compulsory voting laws. Moreover, because compulsory voting caused a substantial increase in voter turnout, the subset of citizens influenced by the policy is nearly the entire population of nonvoters. This analysis brings us closer than ever before to answering the extreme counterfactual question what if everyone voted |