Compelled voters and accountability in Australia

ABSTRACT

Does compulsory voting (CV) result in divergent voting paths? Using the heterogeneous attribution thesis, we test whether compelled voters are less likely to rely on egotropic perceptions of the economy than voluntary voters, depressing the impact of economic voting. Our results show that compelled voters refrain from accurately relying on egotropic perceptions of the economy. Our findings question whether CV does in fact increase accountability to the electorate. While many advocates of CV believe it empowers low SES voters, our findings suggest that even if this is the case, it does so at the expense of holding incumbents accountable for poor economic performance.

KEYWORDS:

• Economic voting
• compulsory voting
• heterogenous attribution theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We define voluntary voters as member of the electorate who would partake in elections if the process was not compulsory. Compelled voters are defined as members of the electorate who would abstain from voting.

2 This is because a patrimonial policy is inherently pocketbook-driven and will fail to drive the economic vote among compelled voters. On the other hand, reduction in the inflation rate is a sociotropic item and will result in economic voting among both voluntary and compelled voters. See Hellwig and McAllister (2018) on the electoral impact of homeownership in Australia.

3 Although commonly referred to as CV, the process of compelling individuals to enter a voting booth does not automatically result in voting. Due to the secret ballot procedure, it is practically impossible to track a ‘valid’ vote to an individual (Quintelier, Hooghe, and Marien 2011). In fact, voters may choose to show up at the polls but refuse to cast a valid ballot. Thus, some have referred to CV as “compulsory attendance” (Hill 2006), since it is attendance that is required, and not the actual vote.

4 But See: Lever (2010).

5 The AES asks would you have voted in the election if voting had not been compulsory? It provides five choices to choose from: Definitely would have voted; Probably would have voted; Might/might not have voted; Probably not have voted; Definitely not have voted. Hellwig and McAllister (2016) relied on six waves of the AES (1998–2013) and coded respondents who answered ‘definitely would have voted’ or ’probably would have voted’ as a ‘1’ with the rest of the three choices being coded as ‘0’. This technique did not provide a statistically significant finding. We revised the coding into a trichotomous structure of the electorate: compelled voters (those who answered that they definitely or probably would not have voted), undecided voters (those who answered that they might/might not have voted), and voluntary voters (those who answered that they definitely or probably would vote).

6 Response rates vary by year. For example, the response rate in 1996 was sixty-two percent. Currently, the AES is partially distributed online. This may explain the significant decrease in the response rate, which in 2016 was twenty-three percent.

7 Here, the AES asked voters for their first preference vote.

8 The 5-category responses are as follows: ‘definitely would have voted’; ‘probably would have voted’; ‘might / might not have voted’; ‘probably not have voted’; definitely would not have voted’. Although the question asked is a hypothetical one, we use it because current Australian voters have always elected their political representatives under CV.

9 The eight elections under consideration include: 1996, 1998, 2001, 2004, 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016. During this time, the Coalition consisting of the Liberal and National parties was the incumbent in five of the eight electoral periods (1998, 2001, 2004, 2007, 2016) and won six of the eight elections (1996, 1998, 2001, 2004, 2013, 2016).

10 We also performed a split-sample analysis and found similar results: among compelled voters changes in egotropic perceptions of the economy are not associated with a vote for the incumbent.

11 Hellwig and McAllister results were based off a much short time-period of AES waves, ranging between 1998 and 2013. In our sample, we expanded the time period from 1996 to 2016. Moreover, Hellwig and McAllister’s model specification is partisan-oriented, while we model the Australian vote function using a combination of sociological and anchor variables.

12 Here, the interaction is between the two ordinal variables, and not a binary choice.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rafael Oganesyan

Rafael Oganesyan is a Program Manager for the Office of Undergraduate Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His research interests focus on economic voting and patronal voting, particularly in the post-Soviet space. His work has been published in French Politics and JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies.

Christian Jensen

Christian Jensen is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His research interests focus on democratic institutions and political parties, especially in the European Union. His work has been widely published in a variety of scholarly journals including the British Journal of Political Science, Electoral Studies, European Journal of Political Research, European Union Politics, Political Research Quarterly and others.