¹ The key paper which sparked contemporary interest in the topic is Lijphart, Arend’s‘Unequal Participation: Democracy’s Unresolved Dilemma’, American Political Science Review, 91 (1997), 1–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A recent British argument for compulsory voting is by Keaney, Emily and Rogers, Ben, ‘A Citizen’s Duty: Voter Inequality and the Case for Compulsory Turnout’, Institute of Public Policy Report, May 2006, available online at www.ippr.org/publicationsandreportsGoogle Scholar. Geoff Hoon, former Defence Minister in the Labour Government, espoused compulsory voting in 2005, and the Guardian on Monday, 4 July 2005, claimed that Hoon had the support of Peter Hain and the former education minister Stephen Twigg. Examples of philosophical arguments for compulsion are Wertheimer, Alan, ‘In Defense of Compulsory Voting’, in J. Roland Pennock and John V. Chapman, eds, Participation in Politics (New York: Lieber-Atherton, 1975), chap. 14, pp. 276–296Google Scholar, and Lacroix, Justine, ‘A Liberal Defence of Compulsory Voting’, Politics, 27 (2007), 190–195CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Mikolay Czesnik discusses recent interest in compulsory voting in Eastern Europe, and the reasons behind it, in ‘Is Compulsory Voting a Remedy? Evidence from the 2001 Polish Parliamentary Elections’ (paper presented to the ECPR Joint Sessions Workshop on Compulsory Voting, Helskinki, 2007).

² Arend Lijphart refers to compulsory turnout in his article. Sarah Birch refers to compulsory participation in ‘Conceptualising Electoral Obligation’ (prepared for the Workshop on ‘Compulsory Voting – Principles and Practice’, ECPR Joint Sessions Workshops, Helsinki, 2007). See also Birch, Sarah, Full Participation: A Comparative Study of Compulsory Voting (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008)Google Scholar, and as an example of the defence of compulsory voting, Birch, Sarah, ‘The Case for Compulsory Voting’, Public Policy Research, Vol (2009), 21–27Google Scholar. There is also a response to Birch, see Annabelle Lever, ‘Democratic Choice, Legitimacy and the Case Against Compulsory Voting’ (see www.ippr.org.uk/uploadedfiles/publicpolicyresearch/democraticchoice.pdf).

³ Examples of democracies with compulsory voting include Australia, Belgium, Luxembourg, Cyprus and Greece; examples of non-democratic instances of compulsory voting are Egypt and Singapore. Australia introduced compulsion in 1924, and surveys suggest that about three-quarters of the electorate are satisfied with the practice. See Hill, Lisa, ‘Compulsory Voting in Australia: History, Public Acceptance and Justifiability’ (paper presented to the ECPR Joint Sessions Workshop on Compulsory Voting, Helsinki, 2007), p. 4Google Scholar. Compulsory voting was introduced in Belgium with the introduction of universal male suffrage. Not only did women then lack the vote, but the male franchise was unequal as additional votes were available based on one’s education and status.

⁴ Pilet, Jean-Benoit, ‘Choosing Compulsory Voting in Belgium: Strategy and Ideas Combined’ (paper presented to the ECPR Joint Sessions Workshop on Compulsory Voting, Helsinki, 2007)Google Scholar. The Netherlands adopted compulsory voting in 1917, along with universal suffrage for men and proportional representation (PR); women got the vote in 1919. The PR system in use at the time apparently required 100 per cent turnout for the results to be truly proportional. I am curious about why this was the system of PR that was adopted, and what connection the adoption of PR had to worries about the consequences of universal suffrage. See Gratschew, Maria, ‘Compulsory Voting in Western Europe’Google Scholar, in Pintor, Rafael López and Gratschew, Maria, Voter Turnout in Western Europe Since 1945: A Regional Report (Stockholm: International International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, 2004), chap. 3, at p. 29Google Scholar.

⁵ Lijphart, , ‘Unequal Participation’, p. 2Google Scholar – ‘low voter turnout means unequal and socioeconomically biased turnout’. Lijphart seems to have been one of the first people to link the two systematically and repeatedly. Two excellent works on turnout are Wattenberg, Martin P., Is Voting for Young People? (New York: Pearson Longman, 2007)Google Scholar; and Blais, André, To Vote or Not to Vote: The Merits and Limitations of Rational Choice Theory (Pittsburg, Pa.: University of Pittsburg Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Stocker, Gerry, ‘Explaining Political Disenchantment, Finding Pathways to Democratic Renewal’, Political Quarterly, 77 (2006), 184–194CrossRefGoogle Scholar, emphasizes that the problem of declining turnout, while widespread, is particularly acute for established democracies.

⁶ Mount, Ferdinand, ‘The Power Inquiry: Making Politics Breathe’, Open Democracy website, 28 February 2006 (see http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalization-institutions_government/power_inquiry_331)Google Scholar. The Power Inquiry itself was chaired by Dame Helena Kennedy. Its report, Power to the People: An Independent Inquiry into Britain’s Democracy was published in March 2006, and painted a damning picture of people’s distrust and alienation from established political institutions and parties (available at. www.powerinquiry.org). However, Tim Bale et al. argue that the Report ‘overdoes the seriousness of the symptoms that so concern it’ and underplays key features of the cure (see Bale, Tim, Taggart, Paul and Walsh, Paul, ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want: Populism and the Power Inquiry’, Political Quarterly, 77 (2006), 195–203CrossRefGoogle Scholar).Charles Pattie and Ron Johnston are more sympathetic to the Report’s description of the symptoms, but dispute its account of the causes and the cure in ‘Power to the People Through “Real Power and True Elections”? The Power Report and Revitalising British Democracy’, Parliamentary Affairs, 60 (2007), 253–278.

⁷ These figures can be found on the Institute for Public Policy Report’s ‘Press Release’ of 1 May 2006, in its report on compulsory voting (see http://www.ippr.org.uk/pressreleases/?id=2083).

⁸ See ‘Hoon calls for compulsory voting’ by Wintour, Patrick, Guardian, Monday, 4 July 2005, available online at http://politics.guardian.co.uk/apathy/story/0,12822.1520779,00.htmlGoogle Scholar.

⁹ Keaney, and Rogers, , ‘A Citizen’s Duty’, pp. 11–12Google Scholar.

¹⁰ However, see Franklin, Mark N., ‘You Want to Vote When Everybody Knows Your Name: Anonymity, Campaign Context and Turnout Among Young Adults’ (unpublished paper, European University Institute, Florence, 2008)Google Scholar.

¹¹ Keaney, and Rogers, , ‘A Citizen’s Duty’, p. 12Google Scholar.

¹² Lijphart, (‘Unequal Participation’, p. 6)Google Scholar notes that ‘the decline in turnout has been accompanied by a “participatory revolution” in Western Europe with regard to more intensive forms of political participation in which class bias is very strong’.

¹³ Lijphart, (‘Unequal Participation’, p. 5)Google Scholar cites evidence that ‘the left share of the total vote increases by almost one-third of a percentage point for every percentage point increase in turnout’. However, in fn. 8, p. 5, he refers to a study of Britain, where ‘high turnout has meant a consistent disadvantage for the Conservatives, a modest gain for the Liberals, and no appreciable advantage for Labour – but, of course, a relative advantage for Labour as a result of the Conservatives’ disadvantage’. This study is from 1986, and so the results may have been affected by the relative scarcity of Labour victories in the period and might look rather different if one extended the results up to 2005.

¹⁴ Keaney, and Rogers, , ‘A Citizen’s Duty’, p. 11Google Scholar. Apparently, MORI estimates from 2001 suggest that only 39 per cent of 18 to 25-year-olds voted, compared to 70 per cent of the over 65s. See also Blais, , To Vote or Not to Vote, pp. 49–54Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Keaney, and Rogers, , ‘A Citizen’s Duty’, p. 11Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Blais, , To Vote or Not to Vote, p. 51Google Scholar, reports that Franklin’s 1996 study of twenty-two countries shows that age comes out as the most important socio-economic variable. Blais’s own analysis of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) survey of nine countries confirmed that age and education are the two critical variables (pp. 51–2).

¹⁷ Lijphart, , ‘Unequal Participation’, p. 7Google Scholar, quotes 15 per cent as the maximum benefit that registration reform would have in the United States, and notes that it is irrelevant to most Western democracies that have fairly high rates of registration to begin with. PR may stimulate turnout by 9–12 per cent, but, as fn. 14, p. 7 makes plain, ‘multipartism, which is strongly associated with PR, depresses turnout – thus undoing some of PR’s beneficial influence – and … bicameralism lowers turnout as well’. At p. 8 he notes that weekend voting increases turnout by 5–6 percentage points in first order elections, and in second order European Parliament elections, weekend voting raised turnout by more than 9 percentage points.

¹⁸ Lijphart, , ‘Unequal Participation’, p. 8Google Scholar. Apparently, compulsion can raise turnout in the range of 7–16 per cent, even when the penalties for voting are low.

¹⁹ Lijphart, , ‘Unequal Participation’, pp. 10–11Google Scholar.

²⁰ Anolabehere, S. and Iyengar, S., Going Negative: How Attack Ads Shrink and Polarize the Electorate, (New York: The Free Press, 1995)Google Scholar, cited by Lijphart, , ‘Unequal Participation’, p. 10Google Scholar.

²¹ Keaney, and Rogers, , ‘A Citizen’s Duty’, p. 7Google Scholar

²² Lijphart, , ‘Unequal Participation’, p. 11Google Scholar, fn. 23. Lijphart is interesting in that he seems to believe that there is a right not to vote, by contrast with Wertheimer, ‘In Defense of Compulsory Voting’, and claims that there is a good case to have the option of voting for ‘none of the above’, and that the right to refuse to accept a ballot ‘is an even more effective method to assure that the right not to vote is not infringed’.

²³ I have been told that in Russia, where people can vote for ‘none of the above’, and are still under various forms of pressure to vote, this is a not-infrequent occurrence at the provincial level. A new election is then called. In considering whether or not we should adopt this option, it is necessary to recognize that the result necessarily extends the life of the government that called the election. Consequently, there seems to be a form of ‘bias towards the status-quo’ in adopting this solution to problems of low turnout.

²⁴ Keaney, and Rogers, , ‘A Citizen’s Duty’, p. 32Google Scholar, fn. 15: ‘It will of course be important to prevent the formation of an “Against All” or “None of the Above” party’. How this is to be done, consistent with the freedom of political association and expression, is not discussed. It is true that it would be necessary to stop parties naming themselves after the ‘none of the above’ option, in order to secure those votes. However, it seems possible – though undesirable pragmatically – for people to form one or more political parties in order to persuade people to vote for ‘none of the above’. So how to handle the issue would require some thought.

²⁵ Wertheimer, (‘In Defense of Compulsory Voting’) is a notable exception; see pp. 280–282Google Scholar, and the summary of his argument at p. 290.

²⁶ Lijphart, , ‘Unequal Participation’, p. 11Google Scholar.

²⁷ Lijphart, , ‘Unequal Participation’, p. 2Google Scholar.

²⁸ In Belgium compulsory voting was introduced in 1893, prior to universal suffrage; Italy and Austria introduced it after the Second World War, although Austria has since ceased to do so, and in Italy sanctions are now informal. Cyprus, Greece, Lichtenstein, Luxembourg and one canton in Switzerland still retain compulsory voting. Australia introduced compulsion in 1924, and surveys suggest that about three-quarters of the electorate are satisfied with the practice. See Hill, Lisa, ‘Compulsory Voting in Australia: History, Public Acceptance and Justifiability’ (paper presented to the ECPR Joint Sessions Workshop on Compulsory Voting, Helsinki, 2007), p. 4Google Scholar.

²⁹ The evidence suggests that compulsory voting does nothing other than raise turnout – and there are, in fact, some questions about how far it is better than other means of doing this, too. Recent work suggests that compulsory voting has no noticeable effect on political knowledge or interest, or, more surprisingly, any evident effect on electoral outcomes, or on the conduct of political campaigns. Hence, Ballinger concludes, ‘Compulsory turnout does not guarantee inclusiveness; nor does it guarantee political equality’. See Ballinger, Chris, ‘Compulsory Turnout: A Solution to Disengagement?’ in Democracy and Voting (The Hansard Society’s Democracy Series, 2006), pp. 5–22Google Scholar, p.13. See also Rovensky, Jan, ‘Voting: A Citizen’s Right, or Duty? The Case Against Compulsory Voting’ (doctoral dissertation, Faculty of Political Science, LUISS Guido Carli, Rome, 2007–08), pp. 42–75Google Scholar on the difficulties of interpreting figures on voter turnout, and pp. 76–93 on the difficulties of connecting low turnout to unequal representation.

³⁰ In Australia, it would seem voters are legally required to cast a valid ballot, see Hill, , ‘Compulsory Voting in Australia’, p. 9Google Scholar, and though Australia allows religious-based conscientious objections to voting, it has prosecuted people who have refused to vote because they thought the alternatives morally unacceptable on non-religious grounds. Moreover, the Australian Electoral Commission successfully fought a freedom of information case in order to prevent the full list of legal exemptions from voting to be disclosed (p. 12). So, actual cases of compulsory voting may be much less generous than this ‘best case’ assumption implies.

³¹ Mill, John Stuart, Considerations on Representative Government, chap. 10Google Scholar.

³² This is partly because there is no reason to suppose that the only justification for voting rights is rights-based, and partly because there is nothing in the idea of a right to vote that implies that people cannot also have duties to vote, even if those duties have no distinctive role in justifying voting rights. See Raz, Joseph, ‘Rights-Based Moralities’, in J. Waldron, ed., Theories of Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), chap. 9, pp. 182–200Google Scholar. For a nice summary of different justifications for universal suffrage, see Weale, Albert, Democracy (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999), chap. 3, pp. 40–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³³ Helen Margetts notes that moving from First Past the Post to Proportional Representation in Britain would raise turnout by about 12 per cent, which is in line with the 10–15 per cent increase ascribed to compulsory voting. See Margetts, Helen, ‘Citizens Cannot be Compelled to Engage with Political Organisations’, in Ballinger, ed., Democracy and Voting, pp. 29–35Google Scholar, at p. 29. Indeed, in 1997, the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters in Australia recommended that compulsory voting be repealed for federal elections and referendums. It claimed: ‘If Australia is to consider itself a mature democracy, compulsory voting should now be abolished’ (quoted in Hill, , ‘Compulsory Voting in Australia’, pp. 4–5Google Scholar).

³⁴ For a discussion of this literature, see Tuck, Richard, Free Riding (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), especially chap. 2, pp. 30–62Google Scholar. Following Tuck, I would distinguish the rationality of contributing to an outcome/decision from being the decisive actor in securing a particular outcome. However, once there are enough votes to secure one’s desired outcome, it is no longer rational to participate. So, as Tuck notes, even if you use a ‘threshold’ view of voting to test rationality, it is not always rational for people to vote. David Runciman has a helpful review of Tuck’s book and its relevance to voting in, ‘Why Not Eat an Éclair?’ London Review of Books, 9 October 2008, pp. 11–14.

³⁵ David Lyons refers to an ‘argumentative threshold’ created by rights, see ‘Utility and Rights’, in Waldron, , ed., Theories of Rights, pp. 114–115Google Scholar.

³⁶ This is partly why Lijphart’s claim that equality requires floors as well as ceilings is problematic: not only is it unclear what is to constitute the floor (the right or its exercise), it is not true that equality always requires floors and ceilings. In some cases, it simply requires standards (one person, one vote); on sufficiency views of equality, it requires floors only; and in some cases, as with campaign finance, one might wish only to prescribe ceilings (a limit on the amount that candidates or parties can spend). For a helpful discussion of competing conceptions of equality, see Clayton, Matthew and Williams, Andrew, eds, The Ideal of Equality (Basingstoke, Hants.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), especially pp. 1–20Google Scholar.

³⁷ Albert Weale discusses the way democracies limit loss in Democracy, p. 139, and chap. 7 on majority rule, and chap. 10 on the obligations of democracy – especially, pp. 195–200 on ‘being outvoted’. See also Anderson, C. J., André Blais, Shaun Bowler and Todd Donovan, Losers’ Consent: Elections and Democratic Legitimacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)Google Scholar, especially chaps 1 and 10.

³⁸ Manin, Bernard, ‘On Legitimacy and Political Deliberation’, Political Theory, 15 (1987), 338–368CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁹ Pateman, Carol, Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fung, Archon, Empowered Participation: Reinventing Urban Democracy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ It is this aspect of democracy, I think, that makes it so radical and which is so distressing to those who want rulers to have special wisdom or qualifications. Weale captures this nicely in Democracy, p. 14, when he distinguishes the role of opinion, rather than knowledge, in democracies.

⁴¹ See, for example, Cohen, Joshua, ‘Procedure and Substance in Deliberative Democracy’, in T. Christiano, ed., Philosophy and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003), pp. 1–17Google Scholar.

⁴² Okin, Susan, Justice, Gender and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989)Google Scholar, chaps 6–8.

⁴³ I think this is the difficulty with ‘procedural’ critiques of judicial review, such as those of Jeremy Waldron and Richard Bellamy, which argue that, whether or not judges are better than legislators at protecting rights, it is undemocratic procedurally for the decisions of judges to override those of legislators. See Lever, A., ‘Democracy and Judicial Review: Are they Really Incompatible?’ Perspectives on Politics, 7 (2009), 805–822CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁴ See Weale, , Democracy, chap. 10, pp. 191–199Google Scholar. See also Lever, A., ‘Is Compulsory Voting Justified’, Public Reason, 1 (2009), 57–74Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ See Cohen, Joshua, ‘Moral Pluralism and Political Consensus’Google Scholar, in Copp, David, Hampton, Jean and Roemer, John E., The Idea of Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 270–291Google Scholar, especially pp. 281–5 on reasonable pluralism.

⁴⁶ For example, David Miller suggested to me that compulsory turnout might be justified as a means for citizens to show support for their society, even if they did not want to choose anyone for their government. Ticking your name off the list would then count as ‘supporting’ something, rather than simply ‘being present’.

⁴⁷ Lever, A., ‘Privacy Rights and Democracy: A Contradiction in Terms?’ Contemporary Political Theory, 5 (2006), 142–162, and ‘Mill and the Secret Ballot: Beyond Coercion and Corruption’, Utilitas, 9 (2007), 354–378Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ Keaney and Rogers seem to think that the ability to vote for ‘none of the above’ ‘would in fact be a far more effective means of withdrawing democratic legitimacy than abstention, as it could not be misread as apathy’ (‘A Citizen’s Duty’, p. 30). Obviously, this requires people to vote, rather than just to turn up. Apart from that, of course, it is easy to imagine the rejoinder to this, which is that people are being lazy when they vote and it is not going to be at all clear that people ticking this option are not protesting compulsion to vote, rather than the options available.

⁴⁹ See, for example, Weale, , Democracy, p. 200Google Scholar, on the difficulty of interpreting voting.

⁵⁰ I owe these points to Cecile Laborde, whose view this is.

⁵¹ Thomson, Judith Jarvis, in William Parent, ed., Rights, Restitution and Risk: Essays in Moral Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), chap. 4, pp. 50–65Google Scholar; see also Waldron, Jeremy, Liberal Rights: Collected Papers 1981–1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), chap. 1, pp. 1–34Google Scholar.

⁵² Not all moral wrongs are violations of rights, as we see in the case of ingratitude, unkindness and selfishness.

⁵³ For a similar argument in response to Mill’s arguments for open voting, see Lever, , ‘Mill and the Secret Ballot’, esp. pp. 360, 375 and 367–371Google Scholar.

⁵⁴ For similar reasons, people cannot be forced publicly to describe and justify their voting intentions, even if this would prevent morally wrongful voting, and hence the difficulties with Brennan and Pettit’s arguments for ‘unveiling the vote’ (see Lever, , ‘Mill and the Secret Ballot’, pp. 354–378Google Scholar; and Brennan, Geoffrey and Pettit, Philip, ‘Unveiling the Vote’, British Journal of Political Science, 20 (1990), 311–333CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁵ For a classic effort to articulate and use this distinction in the analysis of public policy, see, Hart, H. L. A., Law, Liberty and Morality (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1963) , especially chap. 1, pp. 1–24Google Scholar. Even though Devlin rejects the idea that law and morality can be sharply distinguished, he holds that ‘Nothing should be punished by law that does not lie beyond the limits of tolerance’ ( Devlin, Patrick, The Enforcement of Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), chap. 1, especially pp. 16–17Google Scholar). And the idea that the law should not seek to punish all forms of immorality is an old and familiar one.

⁵⁶ Hence, it is possible that compulsory voting favours the far right in Belgium, and that its removal will not have the disastrous consequences which some people on the left have thought (see De Ceuninck, Koenraad, Devos, Carl, Reynaert, Herwig, Valcke, Tony and Verlet, Dries, ‘To Vote or Not to Vote, That Is the Question!’ (presented to the ECPR Joint Sessions Workshop on Compulsory Voting, Helsinki, 2007Google Scholar).

⁵⁷ See also Lever, A., ‘Liberalism, Democracy and the Ethics of Voting’, Politics, 29 (2009), 223–227CrossRefGoogle Scholar.