Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-g4j75 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-02-05T06:42:05.508Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Compulsory Voting Can Increase Political Inequality: Evidence from Brazil

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2017

Gabriel Cepaluni  and
F. Daniel Hidalgo
Gabriel Cepaluni
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, São Paulo State University, São Paulo, SP 01225-010, Brazil
F. Daniel Hidalgo*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
*
e-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

One of the most robust findings on political institutions is that compulsory voting (CV) reduces the participation gap between poorer and wealthier voters. We present evidence that in Brazil, the largest country to use such a rule, CV increases inequality in turnout. We use individual-level data on 140 million Brazilian citizens and two age-based discontinuities to estimate the heterogeneous effects of CV by educational achievement, a strong proxy for socioeconomic status. Evidence from both thresholds shows that the causal effect of CV on turnout among the more educated is at least twice the size of the effect among those with less education. To explain this result, which is the opposite of what is predicted by the existing literature, we argue that nonmonetary penalties for abstention primarily affect middle- and upper-class voters and thus increase their turnout disproportionately. Survey evidence from a national sample provides evidence for the mechanism. Our results show that studies of CV should consider nonmonetary sanctions, as their effects can reverse standard predictions.

Type
Letters
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , Spring 2016 , pp. 273 - 280
Copyright
Copyright © The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

Thanks to seminar participants at the MIT Political Science Experimental Lunch, attendees and discussant at our panel at the 2015 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Asociation, and attendees at the Grupo de Economia Política (GEP) at the University of Sao Paulo. Replication data are available on the Political Analysis Dataverse at http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/N2I9LC. Supplementary materials for this article are available on the Political Analysis Web site.

References

Angrist, J. D., and Pischke, J.-S. 2008. Mostly harmless econometrics: An empiricist's companion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Bechtel, M. M., Hangartner, D., and Schmid, L. 2015. Does Compulsory Voting Increase Support for Leftist Policy? American Journal of Political Science.Google Scholar
Berinsky, A. J. 2005. The perverse consequences of electoral reform in the United States. American Politics Research 33(4): 471–91.Google Scholar
Calonico, S., Cattaneo, M. D., and Titiunik, R. 2014. Robust nonparametric confidence intervals for regression-discontinuity designs. Econometrica 82(6): 2295–326.Google Scholar
Cepaluni, G., and Hidalgo, F. D. 2015. Replication data for: Compulsory voting can increase political inequality: Evidence from Brazil. Harvard Dataverse, V1. http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/N2I9LC.Google Scholar
Enos, R. D., Fowler, A., and Vavreck, L. 2014. Increasing inequality: The effect of gotv mobilization on the composition of the electorate. Journal of Politics 76(1): 273–88.Google Scholar
Fowler, A. 2013. Electoral and policy consequences of voter turnout: Evidence from compulsory voting in Australia. Quarterly Journal of Political Science 8(2): 159–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fowler, A. 2015. Regular voters, marginal voters and the electoral effects of turnout. Political Science Research and Methods 3(02):e1–15.Google Scholar
Hahn, J., Todd, P., and Van der Klaauw, W. 2001. Identification and estimation of treatment effects with a regression-discontinuity design. Econometrica 69(1): 201–9.Google Scholar
Hastie, T. J., and Tibshirani, R. J. 1990. Generalized additive models, Vol. 43. New York: CRC Press.Google Scholar
Jackman, S. 2001. Compulsory voting. In: International encyclopedia of the social and behavioral sciences, eds. Smelser, N. J. and Baltes, P. B., 16314–16318. Oxford, UK: Elsevier Science.Google Scholar
Lam, D., and Levison, D. 1991. Declining inequality in schooling in Brazil and its effects on inequality in earnings. Journal of Development Economics 37(1): 199–225.Google Scholar
Lee, D. S., and Card, D. 2008. Regression discontinuity inference with specification error. Journal of Econometrics 142(2): 655–74.Google Scholar
Lijphart, A. 1997. Unequal participation: Democracy's unresolved dilemma presidential address, American Political Science Association, 1996. American Political Science Review 91(01): 1–14.Google Scholar
McAllister, I. 1986. Compulsory voting, turnout and party advantage in Australia. Politics 21(1): 89–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Power, T. J. 2009. Compulsory for whom? Mandatory voting and electoral participation in Brazil, 1986–2006. Journal of Politics in Latin America 1(1): 97–122.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: PDF

Cepaluni and Hidalgo supplementary material

Appendix

Download Cepaluni and Hidalgo supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 355.5 KB