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Forcing the vote

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by Ben Rogers, associate director, head of democracy
Prospect - 26 May 2006

Why do people vote? This question has always puzzled economists and rational choice theorists, and rightly so. After all, while the ‘costs’ of voting are slight, the ‘benefits’ are even slighter. The chance that any individual’s vote will make any difference to the outcome of a local or national election is vanishingly small.

The question becomes a great deal less puzzling, once you jettison the rational choice assumption that people only do anything its the benefits outweigh the costs, and recognise that people vote as they do so much else – because there is an established norm to which they feel obliged to conform. People vote first and foremost not because they see it as in their interest to vote but because they see it as their obligation to vote and are surrounded by people who expect them to vote. (That’s why, so many non-voters, when asked by pollsters if they voted, lie and say they did).

Understanding the role that norms play in voting not only allows us to understand why people vote, but also why they don’t. Turnout, in short, goes down when people no longer feel obliged to vote. The UK is a case in point. A range of factors have worked to produce the record low turnout of the last few years – the lowest since the introduction of universal suffrage in 1918. These include the relative closeness of the programmes of the main parties, that one party (Labour) has been seen as having had it in the bag, declining identification with political parties, and a diminishing interest in capital ‘P’ Politics. But survey evidence shows that the belief in voting as a duty has also fallen – especially among low turnout groups: young people, poorer people, and most of all among poor young people. Nine out of 10 Britons under Atlee believed that a person had a duty to vote, but that figure has fallen to less than five out of ten today. And only around 2 out of ten poor young people believe in the duty to vote.

What then can be done to re-invigorate the voting norm and get people back into the voting habit? A number of approaches could help. Schools have a role to play in getting children and teenagers to see voting as both an important right but also a duty, not least by holding elections themselves, but also perhaps, by finding ways of engaging children in local and national elections – through the election of youth parliaments or by giving them a vote on matters of importance to them. Colleges, employers and civic organisations have to encourage people to see voting as an essential element to citizenship and encourage them to vote. Local electoral officers could take a more active part in encouraging people to turnout. Most importantly perhaps, if we are going to have state funding for political parties, we need to find ways of ensuring that it funds grass roots activity and not centralised campaigns – people who have been canvassed on the doorstop are much more likely to turnout

Nevertheless by far the most effective way of re-enforcing the voting norm, and boosting turnout would be make turnout compulsory. Countries like Australia or Belgium that oblige citizens to turnout (and note that they oblige them to turnout, not to vote – they can spoil their ballot) have turnouts of more than 90%. And the voters who turnout in such high numbers do so not, for the most part, because they want to avoid being punished (the fines involved are modest and sparsely levied) but because the law itself establishes voting as a civic obligation - much like doing jury service, paying taxes or tolerating the expression of views with which we disagree.

But wouldn’t the British public deeply resent being forced to turnout? Not necessarily. The little polling that there is suggests that we are fairly evenly divided on this issue, with about half inclined to endorse compulsory turnout and about half inclined to oppose. And there are a number of things a government could do to help win support for the measure. First they could give the decision over to the public themselves – by setting up a citizen’s assembly (a public commission made up of ordinary voters appointed at random) to deliberate on the matter, or by holding a referendum on it. Second, they could couple compulsory turnout with measures that would give voters new powers – by establishing an elected house of lords, a reformed voting system for the commons, or new powers of petition, so making compulsory turnout part of a ‘new rights-new responsibilities’ deal.

At the very least, the political class needs to begin taking compulsory turnout seriously. Everyone knows that turnout has fallen over the last few elections. But it is less widely recognised that it has fallen faster among young and poorer groups, further marginalising them from democratic life. Moreover all the indicators are that, other things being equal, voting will continue to fall over the next decades: cohort studies show that the non-voting generations are not picking up the voting habit as they gets older. At the same time it increasingly clear that other measures – postal voting, extended polling hours, registration drives – can’t make more than an marginal contribution to boosting turnout or narrowing voter inequality.

The battle for the franchise was hard-fought, so its only natural that throughout most of 20^th the century, voting should have been viewed as first and foremost a right – the voting norm itself was viewed as something that could be left to take care of itself. That is clearly no longer the case. Compulsory turnout might be the only way to resurrect the voting norm.

Further information on A citizen’s duty: voter inequality and the case for compulsory turnout (ippr) by Ben Rogers and Emily Keaney can be found at: www.ippr.org/publicationsandreports