Compulsory voting: A path towards more and more equal participation

Abstract

Voter turnout levels have been steadily declining in the whole of the world’s democracies, for the last decades. This finding is quite consensual among electoral behavior scholars. For example, Blais (2007) looks at 106 democracies throughout around 35 years, concluding that average voter turnout levels have begun to decline in the 1990’s, and that the average level of such decline is 8 percentage points. This situation is even more problematic if we take into account that one of the major drivers of such a decline is the demobilization of young citizens, who vote at even lower rates than the rest of the population. Such fact has led some to predict a worsening of this problem in the future (Blais & Rubenson 2013).