Young Britons should vote early, and vote often
The Australian Federal Election again showed that making turnout mandatory is proven to increase turnout, with over 86% of the population voting, compared to just 65% in the UK’s 2010 General Election. Professor Sarah Birch argues that the time has come to tackle the crisis of youth disaffectedness with politics by introducing compulsory voting for the first time eligible. Doing so, she argues, would boost turnout, engage voters, and work to the advantage of young people.
What would have happened if the 2010 General Election – lost by Gordon Brown – been run like the 2013 Austrlian Federal Election – lost by Kevin Rudd? (Credit: London Summit, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Australia went to the polls two weeks ago with two unpopular candidates: an incumbent (Labor) prime minister in Kevin Rudd (with a net approval rating of -9) and his rival, the Coalition leader Tony Abbott. Despite the latter proving victorious, his approval rating going into the election was an unimpressive -5. Despite the relative unpopularity of both options for the top job, Australia again achieved a high turnout, with 86.08% voting. This compares favourably to the relatively meagre 65% in the UK General Election in 2010. Why? Because it is compulsory to vote in Australia.
In Britain it isn’t – and as a result people are turned off civic participation at an early age – it is well established that young people are less likely to take part in elections than older members of the electorate. Between 1970 and 2010 the percentage point difference between turnout among 18 to 24-year-olds and those over 65 has increased from 18% to 32% in the UK. At the 2010 election those numbers played out like this: 76% of the over-65s voted while only 44% of the 18-24s cast a ballot paper.
And these differential turnout rates matter – they have considerable implications for policy outputs. A forthcoming report by the Institute for Public Policy Research, Divided Democracy: Political Inequality in the UK, suggests that the recent round of spending cuts has resulted in an average loss of services equivalent to 28% of the annual household income for those between the ages of 16 and 24, but only 10% for those aged 55 to 74.
Think the triple lock on pension increases compared to the ever-rising cost of university fees. Young people are getting short-changed by governments of all complexions, and that is because politicians have scant incentive to listen to them. The result is a vicious cycle whereby politicians neglect the concerns of young people because they know they are less likely to vote than their elders, and young people – correctly – perceive that politicians are not speaking to their concerns. These two reinforcing processes combine to generate a spiral of disengagement.
Recent developments suggest that the problem is only going to get worse. Political parties have become considerably more adept at targeting voters with their communications. Not surprisingly, they tend to target groups that are most likely to vote and to neglect those known to shun the ballot box.
Young people, for their part, have a greater range of – largely digital – pastimes to occupy them. In comparison to Facebook, computer games, and the drama of reality TV, traipsing to a shabby community hall to tick a box with a pencil must seem quite old-fashioned and remote. So what is to be done? The most common response is to suggest that politicians “should” engage more with young people. But exhortations to politicians to change their behaviour are idealistic and out of touch with political reality. If politicians are to change, they need a reason to change.
Bold action needed
Given the severity of the problem, the only viable solution is to take bold action to break the vicious cycle of disengagement by requiring first-time electors to attend a polling station and cast a ballot.First-time compulsory voting can be expected to have two distinct consequences. First, it will give politicians a reason to engage with younger voters. By boosting the collective voice of young people, this reform would make all parties more attentive to their concerns.
Second, our research suggests that requiring voters to vote the first time they are eligible will go some way toward making voting habitual. The idea that most non-voters are too alienated by politics to go to the polls is only partially true. Decades of research on electoral participation tell us that the reasons are more complex. People forget; people can’t be bothered to find out where the polling station is or when it is open – or voting simply isn’t seen as something they can connect with. Such cultural and lifestyle reasons account for far more voter abstention than active dislike of politicians.
These “lifestyle non-voters” might well be inclined to vote if they were nudged into voting at least once. And there is considerable evidence that if people vote at the start of their careers as citizens, they are more likely to carry on voting. There are thus two good reasons for requiring young people to attend a polling station once in their lives: to pressure politicians into engaging with them and to help make voting habitual.So what about the objections to this proposal? By far the most common concern is that if people are compelled to do something, they will resent it and that first-time compulsory voting may thus be counter-productive.
Yet there are a wide variety of things that people are compelled to do, and once they get used to the idea, they often accept such constraints. These include compulsory education, taxation, jury service, completion of the census, and voter registration. Like jury service and voter registration, voting for the first time would be a civic duty. And a not very onerous one at that.
Another frequent objection is that is unfair to oblige anyone to choose from a list of options if they do not genuinely like any of what is on offer. It is for this reason that a “none of the above” box should be added to the ballot, so people would have the option of sending a clear message to the political elite that they do not find the policies of any party attractive.
A third common objection is that compulsory first-time voting would be difficult to enforce. Yet approximately a quarter of all democracies, including – as already mentioned – Australia andBelgium, have systems of compulsory voting, many of which are effectively enforced by means of small fines. The comparative evidence suggests also that countries with compulsory voting have higher levels of satisfaction with democracy as well as higher levels of non-electoral participation. Requiring people to vote once in their life is not a big ask, but it could potentially have far-reaching consequences both for policy delivery and political engagement.
Note: the views contained in this article represent the views of the author, and not those of Democratic Audit or the LSE. It was originally posted on ‘The Conversation’ and can be found in its original form here.
Professor Sarah Birch is a Professor of Comparative Politics at Glasgow University
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I have a fundamental objection to compulsory voting for any group of electors, which is basically that if the politicians can’t persuade the electors to vote then that is the politicians’ fault, not the electors’. Would you couple this with a system of making manifesto commitments binding, in the sense that penalties or disqualifications would ensue for politicians which broke them? Or absolutely forbid all influences on politicians other than their electors’ wishes – such as lobbying and significant financial donations?
But a more immediate objection is this – for this particular proposal to be implemented, at least one major political party has got to take it through parliament. Which party is going to saddle itself at future elections with a huge tranche of cynical and hard-to-contact electors whose interests they have traditionally, as you observe, not had close to their hearts? And if the majority party had been elected by, say, 45% of a 66% turnout, could they seriously claim a moral mandate to make voting compulsory?
Just a small fyi – turnout at Australian elections is actually even higher than you’re suggesting! The 86.08% figure you quote must have been a provisional figure as the AEC now reports turnout to be 93.18%, which is much more in fitting with what turnout generally tends to be (see here for example: https://www.idea.int/vt/countryview.cfm?id=15).
If 93.18% is the final figure this would actually be the lowest turnout at a federal election since the 1925 election (91.39%) – the first to be held with compulsory voting.