Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 2015 Vol. 18, No. 6, 652–660, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13698230.2015.1092658
Republican democracy and compulsory voting Lisa Hill* Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia In this article, I focus on Chapters 4 and 5 of On the People’s Terms, chapters that deal with democratic influence and control. I take an applied political science approach to how Pettit’s republic might be practically achieved by exploring the under-appreciated capacity of elections to mobilise the resistance-prone, contestatory public upon which his republicanism depends. Whereas Pettit tends to focus on public contestation between elections and only demands that the public has the opportunity to vote when elections are held, I argue that they should be given a more prominent role within his republic and further, that access to voting is not enough: rather, citizens should actually vote. In order to ensure that participation is socially inclusive and that the public’s attempts at influence are ‘individualised’, ‘unconditioned’ and ‘efficacious’ in the manner Pettit desires, I suggest that compulsory voting should be a major pillar of his republicanism. Keywords: elections; compulsory voting; inclusiveness; influence; control
In the following discussion, I focus on Chapters 4 and 5 of Philip Pettit’s fine book, On the People’s Terms. These chapters deal with democratic influence and control and I approach Pettit’s argument from a largely applied, political science perspective. Although Pettit quite deliberately avoids providing too much detail about the practical mechanics of his republic, I think some institutional working out his ideas (which all seem basically sound to me) is called for. I want to talk about the kinds of political outputs his model requires as well as the feasibility of the sort of control he wants to see exerted by his contestatory public. It seems to me that Pettit might take greater account of the fact that it is increasingly difficult to mobilise the kind of fractious citizenry upon which his republicanism depends. Recent trends in political behaviour and attitudes show that people are less inclined than they ever were to mobilise politically within civil society and increasingly conflict-averse when it comes to politics. Those that do mobilise tend to be the same people who turn out to vote, so there is a danger that, in stimulating contestation, the power of those already mobilised – usually the comparatively well off – is merely amplified. *Email:
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Because of these concerns, I’m going to talk about the ways elections can be made more effective in the light of republican goals and desiderata. I concentrate on elections because, even though Pettit sees them as central features of his republic, he tends to focus more on their limitations. I suggest that although elections have their problems, under the right conditions, they can be an effective and efficient means for exerting control over governments. Popular control over governments in Pettit’s republic must meet three conditions. First, it must be ‘individualised’ meaning that it must be equally accessible to all citizens and ‘equally shared amongst citizens’; second, it must be unconditioned, meaning that it should not depend ‘on the willingness of the government … to humour the citizens’; and third, it must be ‘efficacious’ so that ‘even unwelcome government intervention’ does not burden citizens with a sense of ‘an alien will at work in their lives’; instead, the intervention will be experienced ‘as just tough luck’ (Pettit 2012, p. 153). Pettit does not ignore elections: in fact, at one point, he says that ‘the influence that people might command under an electoral system that is suitably individualised and unconditioned is enormous’ (Pettit 2012, p. 229). Yet, he does not pay much attention to how elections – and the potential power they offer citizens – might be rendered more individualised, unconditioned and efficacious. According to Pettit, no electoral system is ‘guaranteed to provide for the individualised, unconditioned and efficacious system of directed popular influence that republican democracy requires’. Elections ‘may be necessary for democracy … but they are very unlikely to be sufficient’ (Pettit 2012, p. 304). A significant limitation of elections is that, although they ‘can give each citizen a vote with the same value’ this is ‘not sufficient to ensure that they each have equal access to influence as individualization requires’. In any given election, at least half of the electorate will be on the losing side and will have ‘little or no sense … that, equally with the winners, they contributed to determining’ policy outcomes. This will usually occur because of the existence of what Pettit calls ‘sticky minorities’ whose identity ‘fixes how they are likely to vote on various questions’. The result is ‘the old problem of majority tyranny’ (Pettit 2012, pp. 2010–2012). I would add that, even if we were to get the governments and policy packages, we all wanted at every election, governments regularly break election promises and go in unexpected directions that we haven’t mandated at election time so the need for constant vigilance and control over them – in the way Pettit describes – is indispensable. Because elections have limitations, says Pettit, ‘the only hope’ is to ‘allow individuals or subgroups to contest various decisions’ continuously and between elections. If the citizens ‘are to keep the republic to its proper business then they had better have the collective and individual virtue to … contest public policies and initiatives’. As Pettit properly notes, ‘the price’ of republican liberty is ‘eternal vigilance’. Each of us must be capable of democratic contestation or at least of delegating contestation to ‘private attorneys general’,
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unelected authorities who are ‘ready to bring charges against those in government’ so that public decisions are always transparent and impartial (Pettit 2012, pp. 237, 227). This unremitting vigilance and contestation nourishes the polity and keeps domination at bay. It is true that elections can be rather blunt instruments for communicating mandates and exercising control. Therefore Pettit is right to insist that contestation needs to be persistent so that individualisation of power can be expressed and exerted. The difficulty lies in getting the people to be willing and able to do this. Although we can never really eradicate sticky electoral minorities, the problem is not without some degree of institutional remedy. There are a number of institutional reforms that can mitigate the evil of the ‘tyranny of the majority’ including proportional representation (which allows even quite small minorities to gain some representation), preferential voting (which Pettit considers at one point) and reserved seats in parliaments for minorities. Although it does not ameliorate the problem of sticky minorities, one other very powerful way of making people’s controlling power more individualised is compulsory voting which can address the problem of unequal voting power that besets most electoral systems. It also has a number of other positive effects from which the republican constitution could profit. While this might seem like a sensible suggestion to me, I wonder why Pettit doesn’t embrace it.1 Instead he seems to be advocating a voluntary system. After posing the question ‘what does equality in the exercise of influence require?’ he concludes that ‘[i]t cannot require that everyone should participate equally in the system of popular influence, since some individuals may choose not to play their part in the system or be happy to go along with what others decide’ (Pettit 2012, p. 169, my emphasis). Pettit argues that ‘equally shared influence’ does not require that all participate, only that there is ‘equal access to the system of popular influence’ and that so long as everyone has ‘an opportunity for participation … with equal ease’ then the institutional arrangements are adequate (Pettit 2012, p. 169, my emphases). I don’t think Pettit’s position here is strong enough: equality of opportunity to participate electorally is not sufficient to ensure individualisation, unconditionality and efficaciousness of citizen control. Rather people must actually vote. Pettit seems inclined to the view that a lot of the time the mere threat of electoral retaliation will be sufficient to rein governments in and that the power of the people consists just as much in their ‘actual electoral and contestatory inputs’ as in their ‘dispositions to make such inputs should government take a line they do not like’ (Pettit 2012, p. 306, my emphases). I return to this point below: for the moment I want to explore why compelling people to vote is compatible with republicanism. It is unclear why Pettit seems averse to incorporating compulsory voting within his republic given his position that interference can be consistent with non-domination. He gives the example of the person who gives his friend the
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keys to his alcohol cabinet, making the friend promise ‘to return the key only at 24 hours notice and not in response to a request for its immediate return’. Even when the friend refuses a request for its immediate return, this interference does not constitute domination liable to ‘trigger resentment’ because the owner of the cabinet retains control insofar as he is interfered with on his own terms (Pettit 2012, p. 57). Compulsory voting is a lot like this example. In properly administered systems, the state compels people to vote (or more correctly, to attend a polling booth)2 and yet voters retrospectively approve the compulsion. So, it operates in a way that enables ‘citizens of a state’ to ‘be free and yet be subject to state coercion’ (Pettit 2012, p. 148). It is ‘controlled interference’ of the type all states exert in order to do their job (Pettit 2012, p. 153). We might also think of compulsory voting as an instance of self-paternalism. Self-paternalism is not true paternalism because there are certain decisions that are usually regretted, such as failing to wear a seatbelt in the case of an accident that results in catastrophic injury. Rather than assuming that individuals are at all times the sole and best judge of their own interests, this model of ‘retrospective rationality’ anticipates those occasions when individuals might mistake their ‘future interests and, hence, on which legal compulsion could help protect a person’ from herself (Goodin 1982, p. 49). The case of Australia exemplifies this point very well. Although compulsory voting was a government initiative, the public readily embraced it as a sensible idea. Support for the institution has been high for decades, as is compliance, despite the fact that sanctions are mild (Hill 2010). So, compelling people to vote is certainly interference but, when managed properly, it can be quite consistent with non-domination. At this point, I should stress that I would not defend all types of compulsory regimes; only those that operate within properly functioning and authentic democracies. For a compulsory voting regime to be both effective (i.e. assuring high turnout and being well tolerated) and appropriate, insofar as it is not being used as a mechanism to manufacture consent, a number of conditions need to be met, including a well-established system of democratic institutions and adequate civil and political rights protection. In addition, voting should be relatively easy with few opportunity and transactions costs to voters while enforcement should not be heavy-handed. Compulsory voting can substantially and demonstrably enhance the values of individualisation, efficaciousness and unconditionality of control. I can see three reasons why compulsory voting is both compatible with and useful to republican goals. 1. Individualisation and equality of electoral power Compulsory voting enhances individualisation of control by ensuring universal access, protecting the one-vote, one value principle and encouraging governors to be more responsive to the attempted control of the electorate. It offers the
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chance of real influence which Pettit defines as evoking a pattern of government behaviour that is both desired and designed by those seeking to influence (Pettit 2012, pp. 154–155). Pettit stipulates that ‘[u]nder a system of electoral influence … every individual should have the same voting power, access to voting should be equal for all, and votes should be aggregated in a way that privileges no voter over others’ (Pettit 2012, p. 2010). Yet, as I’ve mentioned, he also seems to suggest that that it is not necessary for everyone to vote; only that everyone has the opportunity to influence political decision-making. The problem with this position is that opportunity to participate (i.e. voluntary voting) inevitably leads to low turnout. In most advanced voluntary voting democracies, turnout tends to be low. This is a problem because low turnout invariably means low and socially uneven turnout. Low-turnout elections therefore aggregate the preferences of an unrepresentative sample of the eligible population. In industrial democracies worldwide, (bear in mind that my comments are limited to advanced democracies since these are the only sort that could institutionally support republican democracy) failure to vote is generally concentrated among groups already experiencing one or more forms of exclusion or deprivation, namely the poor, the unemployed, the homeless, indigenous peoples, remote citizens, new citizens, prisoners, the young, and people with low literacy, numeracy and majority language competence. Low and socially uneven voting levels therefore operate as the functional equivalent of weighted votes for the well off (Lijphart 1997, p. 7) and this is, of course, inimical to republicanism. When turnout is low, the voting power of the poor and marginal is directly translated into greater voting power for the better off. Worse still, turnout decline is steepest among the poorly off, exacerbating the political equality problem even further. There is no sign of this trend abating. But in places where voting is compulsory, voting rates are both high and socially even. Of course, there are some voluntary voting settings where turnout is also both high and therefore socially even. But such cases are very rare: the only really reliable means by which to maintain high turnout is to make voting mandatory (Louth and Hill 2005). From an outputs perspective, high and socially even turnout matters because governments are more attentive to the demands of habitual voting groups at the expense of those who abstain. Because voting is concentrated among the more prosperous members of society, it tends to help people who are already better off. It turns out that voter’s preferences count more. As Burnham (1987, p. 99) once put it: ‘if you don’t vote, you don’t count’. There are many studies that have detected a strong relationship between electoral participation rates and the implementation of public policies that affect spending in important areas like health services, education and public amenities (see Brennan and Hill 2014, Ch. 6). This relationship is particularly true of redistribution that affects those on lower incomes (Mahler 2008, pp. 161, 178). In electoral constituencies where the participation of the disadvantaged is greater,
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welfare policies are more generous and the state tends to be more redistributionist. Not surprisingly, then, settings with compulsory voting have less income inequality than voluntary systems (Birch 2009, p. 131). Concentrations of consistent voters are known as ‘attentive publics’ and attentive publics, in turn, bask in the attention of politicians (Martin 2003, p. 112). Therefore, the kind of high and socially even turnout that only compulsory voting can deliver makes a difference to our ability to control governments. Full voting participation offers citizens real influence insofar as it results in a desired and designed pattern of government behaviour that serves the objective interests of those seeking influence. So, the mere opportunity to vote is not enough to make a system as responsive to the attempted control of the people as it could be. An opportunity to vote is not the same as actually voting. The opportunity to vote is certainly a necessary condition of republican elections, but whether it is a sufficient one is debatable. Potential electoral sanctions do not get the job done. Governments must know for sure that the people – especially those most affected by government decisions (the poor and marginalised) – will strike against them. In any case, it is not clear that even where voluntary elections are reasonably free and fair that everyone does, in fact, have an equal opportunity to vote. I am highly sceptical of the characterisation of electoral quiescence as a choice made by those ‘happy to go along with what others decide’ (Pettit 2012, p. 169). Can it really be the case that voting abstention – with all its self-defeating consequences – is a positive choice? If it is, why is it ‘choice’ favoured by the disadvantaged? Surely the abstention of the poorly off cannot be taken for consent since survey data consistently tell us that abstainers are less satisfied with the state of democracy than are voters. A more plausible explanation is that in voluntary voting systems, the disadvantaged are subject to a disabling coordination problem because the norms of their social group make voting irrational. Whereas it is normal for educated, prosperous, white and older populations to vote, the habit of voting has failed to become firmly established among poorer, less well-educated and younger populations. Members of non-voting minorities make the quite sensible calculation that it would be irrational to be one of the few members of their social group to bother voting and even if they do not make this calculation, it would still be true. This coordination problem is exacerbated by the fact that habitual non-voters are less likely to be targeted by the mobilisation efforts of parties (e.g. Wielhouwer 1995, Gershtenson 2003). But where voting is compulsory, coordination among the disadvantaged is assured and voting becomes a rational activity that organises them into power-blocs. Although the idea of compelling people to vote seems foreign to many, there is nothing in Pettit’s republicanism that might prevent it from being a major pillar of his constitution. In fact, it is probably the most expedient means
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for delivering the attentive, resistance-prone public required to enliven his republic. Compulsory voting makes the control of the people when voting more individualised and more efficacious. But it can also make a difference between elections, when voting is over in the following two ways. 2. Compulsory voting offers the potential for more efficacious and unconditioned control This is because it seems to render the decisions of the legislature more responsive to attempts at control by the people, as has already been shown. Further, the performances of governments elected under a mandatory regime are more satisfactory than those elected under voluntary regimes. Such governments also enjoy higher levels of public approval. Australia, which is an example of a particularly well-managed compulsory voting regime, offers strong evidence for this claim. A recent large-scale study of Australian political attitudes found that 85.5% of voting age Australians are ‘satisfied with the way democracy is working in Australia’. Only 10.8% believe that ‘[i]t doesn’t make any difference who is in power’ while 91.1% believe that ‘who people vote for can make a big difference’ (Bean et al. 2008). These trends are consistent with the multi-setting finding that ‘compulsory voting has a strong and significant impact on satisfaction with democracy’ (Birch 2009, pp. 132–133). Australians also exhibit high levels of trust in government compared to citizens in other advanced democracies. Significantly, they also report ‘very low levels of perceived political corruption’ (Donovan et al. 2007, p. 102). This perception is grounded in reality: compulsory voting regimes do, in fact, experience lower levels of political corruption (Birch 2009, pp. 132–133). Finally, compulsory voting can be an impetus to high standards of electoral management (which Pettit identifies as a key institutional requirement for republicanism) (see Hill 2010). So compulsory voting seems to give us more responsive government, less corruption, higher levels of citizen satisfaction and therefore higher levels of legitimacy than voluntary voting democracies, all positive grist to the republican mill. 3. Compulsory voting helps to stimulate contestation Finally, compulsory voting can ease the challenges of mobilising a resistanceprone citizenry. Since escalating civic withdrawal (particularly among the young and disadvantaged) is a major problem facing advanced democracies everywhere, finding ways to mobilise Pettit’s contestatory citizenry would likely be the greatest practical obstacle his republic’s realisation. Ensuring near-universal electoral participation can be helpful here both directly and indirectly. In terms of direct effects, we know that compulsory voting has a
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positive impact on the ‘propensity to participate in protests and demonstrations’ and on political participation in general (Birch 2009) therefore it works to stimulate active citizenship not only at elections but between elections. Indirectly, the near-complete voting participation it can guarantee helps to protect the contestatory framework within which citizens are supposed to agitate. It is surely vital to elect assemblies that are not tyrannical or biased towards the interests of those who might not welcome contestation; that do not seek to erode the spheres of resistance (civil society) upon which the republic depends. Representative assemblies are central to determining the breadth and legality of democratic resistance. It is the legislature that often determines the democratic framework, that is, whether the spheres of contestation will be allowed to exist at all. It can constrain free speech and the right to protest; it can outlaw certain interest groups and make striking illegal. Once these abridgements happen, the dangers of overreliance on resistance between elections become apparent. Participating in the selection of those who make decisions about the existence and extent of the spheres of contestation is therefore central to the moderation of domination. We are more likely to avoid a dominating government when everyone – not just elites – votes. Voting for our democratic representatives is a special activity, not just one of the many ways in which we can participate politically. Given the relatively low costs involved, it is reasonable to conscript voters so that they can enjoy the freedom of living in a properly functioning republic with multiple access points for resistance. In sum, contestation between elections is not ‘the only hope’ for republican vitality: elections themselves can be great aids if the will is there to make them work better. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes 1. 2.
He seems to dismiss the idea on the one occasion it is mentioned (Pettit 2012, p. 169). However, in places like Australia and Belgium, most people who attend do end up voting.
Notes on contributor Lisa Hill is a political theorist and conceptual historian with an additional interest in electoral issues. She is professor of Politics at the University of Adelaide and previously was a Research Fellow in Political Science at the Research School of Social Sciences, ANU. Recent publications include Compulsory Voting: For and Against, New York/ London: Cambridge University Press, 2014 (with Jason Brennan) and The Intellectual History of Political Corruption, London/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014 (with Bruce Buchan).
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