The History of Compulsory Voting in Europe

Democracy's Duty?

Anthoula Malkopoulou

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138021976
• eBook ISBN: 9781317693338
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Democracy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Is voting out of fashion? Does it matter if voters don't show up at the polls? If yes, is legal enforcement of voting compatible with democracy? These are just a few of the questions linked to the thorny problem of electoral abstention. This book addresses the hot question whether there is a duty to vote and if this is enforceable in the form of compulsory voting.

Divided into two parts, Anthoula Malkopoulou begins by expertly presenting the importance of compulsory voting today, situating the debate within the contemporary discussion on liberty, equality and democracy. Then, she questions the historical origins of the idea in Europe. In particular, she examines parliamentary discussions and other primary sources from France and Greece, including a few additional insights from other countries like Switzerland and Belgium. Focusing especially on the years between 1870 and 1930, the reader learns about the historical actors of the debates, their efforts to legitimate punishment of abstention through normative arguments, but also their strategic motivations and political interests. While discussions at the beginning of the century focus on introducing compulsory voting, Malkopoulou criticizes its misuse after the Second World War, exposing the contingency of relevant normative claims today and the conditionality of compulsory voting.

From ancient times until today, you learn about the ideological debates, their political context and how the problems of equal representation and democratic moderation persist through the ages.

Part I
Past and Present

1 Compulsory Voting and Contemporary Democratic Theory

Compulsory voting is a political question par excellence. It has been debated since its inception primarily through normative arguments that carry ideological commitments and state-theoretical assumptions. Among them, the key riddle is to what extent a legal obligation to vote complies with our conception of democracy. In fact, proponents argue that low electoral participation—known as ‘voter apathy’, which a prohibition of abstention is supposed to solve—is indeed a problem because it robs the political system of democratic legitimacy. This particular claim encompasses most of the controversy around the issue, not only because of ambivalence about how actual or enforced participation promotes democracy, but especially because there is no consensus about the definitive principles through which democracy is conceptualized and realized.

The contemporary debate on compulsory voting that has intensified since the late 1990s has mostly focused on theoretical assumptions that are illuminated through present-day empirical realities. Although most interventions in the debate contain various normative arguments, they have mostly revolved around two principal concepts, freedom and equality, and their corresponding relation to democracy. In the first case, compulsory voting advocates speak of abstention as a source of elite domination,¹ while opponents support the liberty of conscience and the so-called right to abstain as a matter of free choice.² With regard to the second issue, opponents claim that formal or legal equality of the right to vote is a sufficient democratic criterion³ and that only informed citizens should actually vote.⁴ In contrast, supporters underline that the practice of optional voting creates substantive inequalities between citizens with regard to political agenda-setting, inclusion, representativeness and socioeconomic wellbeing.⁵ My aim is to move beyond this strict equality-versus-freedom dichotomy and show that the contemporary debate neglects what has been historically the central rationale for compulsory voting, namely political moderation.

In this chapter, I critically discuss the contemporary debate for and against compulsory voting in order to demonstrate its disconnect from the historical precedents. My main argument is that a legal requirement to vote would contribute to the consolidation of democracy in more ways than have been acknowledged in the current debate. After clarifying the main contingencies that condition the question at hand, I delve into the normative criticisms of compulsory voting that have been made in the name of liberty, as well as the counterclaims. Next, I treat the central issue of democratic equality, again from both sides of the debate, and continue by underlining the positive effects of compulsory voting on citizenship. I conclude by emphasizing the missing link to the principle of democratic moderation, which has historically been realized through compulsory voting. The last part will summarize the findings.

1. Compulsory Voting and Contingency

Before moving to the main part of the discussion, lest it turn into an academic hot potato, potential voting must be acknowledged as a political reform issue, whose meaning depends on a number of contingent factors. These include first of all the electoral system and the type of election in which citizens are required to vote.⁶ For example, compared to a proportional system, compelling citizens to vote in a majoritarian system is more pressing, while compelling them in an EU election, compared to a national ballot, may raise additional resistance due to opposition to the EU itself. Other institutional aspects that co-determine the positive effects of compulsory voting are low electoral thresholds, an inclusive franchise, facilitated access to the polls, voter-friendly design of ballots, the provisions of reasonable exceptions to compulsion, mildness of sanctions, effective electoral administration and a functional system of enforcement. In addition, It goes without saying that for a legal obligation to have a meaningful scope, it has to be undertaken in a context of multi-party politics, free and fair elections and respect for human rights. Hence, the normative support for compulsory voting is relevant only for advanced democracies and presumes that all other institutional variables have, if not an ideal, at least a neutral value.

Furthermore, the terms of the debate depend on the historical experience and the political culture. In countries with a long history of compulsory voting, such as Australia and Belgium, the public’s response is mostly favour-able,⁷ whereas the novelty of the idea elsewhere (e.g., in Britain⁸ or in the US)⁹ raises more doubts and scepticism. In any case, the issue has by now attracted in many countries attention both from the scientific community and from parliamentarians.¹⁰ There is also a tendency of Labour parties to support and Liberal parties to oppose the idea, on both ideological and strategic grounds, although there are only weak indications that these parties would indeed stand to win or lose respectively from the reform.¹¹ Finally, as with every other electoral reform, the political context, the parliamentary power-balance, the timing of parliamentary bills, as well as technical details of the reform have significant weight when it comes to introducing or abolishing such a system.

In addition to partisan dispositions, political and social exigencies play a vital role in the justification of compulsory voting. Some disagreement seems to exist as to the particular phenomenon or problem that compulsory voting is expected to respond to. It has been suggested as a solution to social injustice, while others have invested much in its capacity to hold back the rise of extreme right-wing parties.¹² While neither of these effects is unrealistic, most supporters agree that the formal aim of punishing abstention is simply to achieve maximum participation of eligible voters in the polls. They would also agree that the substantial goal of the full-turnout project is to promote democratic legitimacy and, only as an indirect consequence, to inject a dose of social justice or, as I argue, political moderation in established democracies. In any case, most of the consensus seems to be about the reasons to reject the idea.

II. Democratic Liberty

1. Freedom of Thought

The main normative objection to mandatory voting is that it constitutes a straightforward violation of individual liberty. This argument has two distinct components in terms of types of liberty that are supposedly affected: liberty of conscience and liberty of participation. In the first case, voting enforcement is deemed to be a violation of freedom of thought and conscience on the one hand and of the freedom to publicly manifest one’s views on the other, as was unsuccessfully argued before the European Court of Human Rights in 1972.¹³ The principle of free elections, the plaintiffs said, requires that no threat of sanction or legal coercion impose limitations on these civil liberties. Voters should always have the chance to renounce all candidates in an election without being prosecuted for such an act.

The logic behind this argument is that abstention is a political act in itself, which is justified when the surrounding institutional or political environment does not provide the legal guarantees for free and fair elections. This was the case, for example, in Cold War Greece, when all voters including ‘reds’ were obliged to participate in elections, although the Greek Communist Party had been banished.¹⁴ Similarly, in non-competitive or single candidate elections, such as were taking place in the Soviet Union, abstention was understood as a matter of conscious political dissent¹⁵ that had to be protected by law. Therefore, W. H. Morris Jones warned that a legal obligation to vote could be used by authoritarian governments as a tool to ‘correct’ deviant political behaviour. The argument put forth was that ‘a Duty to Vote belong[s] properly to the totalitarian camp and are out of place in the vocabulary of liberal democracy’.¹⁶ The latter should simply accept ‘that people are free to interest themselves, or disinterest themselves, as they please in politics’.¹⁷ Hence, vote evasion was seen as an act of protest against elections that were used as a rubber stamp for undemocratic leaders; in other words, as a political act par excellence.

The same line of reasoning was soon adapted to criticize the weaknesses of established democracies. It was held that abstention is justified, or even recommended, within a majoritarian or otherwise unfair election system, ¹⁸ as well as when legal or other barriers prevent new candidates from running. ‘When voting is compulsory, there is no way to tell a coerced choice among evils from a voluntarily expressed positive preference’.¹⁹ The factors that inhibit voters from participation in elections are not always indifference and a lack of interest, but ‘a paucity of choices or a lack of evident connection between electoral choice and policy change’.²⁰ Low levels of turnout are thus seen by many political economists as a register of popular disaffection; non-participation is a means by which voters may protest against narrow electoral choices or express their disapproval of the existing party system.

In this sense, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Historicizing Compulsory Voting: Debates Past and Present
• PART I Past and Present
• PART II Parliamentary Debates since the Nineteenth Century
• Conclusions
• Index