Compulsory Voting

The American political system has always been of great interest to me, so it made sense for me to study Political Science in college. I enjoy learning about the workings of our political system and found an article written by Michael Bechtel, Dominik Hangartner, and Lukas Schmid, that discusses the affects that compulsory voting would have on public policy. This article titled Does Compulsory Voting Increase Support for Leftist Policy? addresses the idea that if everyone in society engaged in voting, that public policies would be more liberal and the lower class would receive more benefits.

In Bechtel, Hangartner, and Schmid’s article entitled Does Compulsory Voting Increase Support for Leftist Policy?, the authors discuss the importance

Their reasoning behind this theory is that “low income earners, the less educated, the less urban, the young, and ethnic minorities have a significantly lower propensity to vote [when voluntary]” ( Bechtel 1), which leaves the middle/upper class and ethnic majority to vote on policy that will affect the entire population. These classes are not as concerned with policy that will benefit the lower class and this is shown by “public policy systematically benefiting voters over nonvoters” (Bechtel 1). The authors found that it is difficult to prove the impact compulsory voting on policy between elections because of the changing political and social environment in countries and factors such as international problems, candidates running for office and economic issues facing the country. This causes the authors to be unable to definitely say whether or not a change in election results are due to compulsory voting or some of the other social changes. Another problem that the authors faced in determining causation in changes is the fact that policies are proposed by candidates, and that people could be voting for a candidate based off of their personality and campaigning instead of voting for the specific policy