Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Home

On the Justifiability of Compulsory Voting: Reply to Lever

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 July 2010

Abstract

Image of the first page of this article

Type
Notes and Comments
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below.

References

1 Lever, Annabelle, ‘Compulsory Voting: A Critical Perspective’, British Journal of Political Science, 40 (2010), 897–915, pp. 900–901, 908–910, 910–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Lever, , ‘Compulsory Voting’, p. 901Google Scholar.

3 Lijphart, Arend, ‘Unequal Participation: Democracy’s Unresolved Dilemma’, American Political Science Review, 19 (1997), 114CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hill, Lisa, ‘On the Reasonableness of Compelling Citizens to Vote: The Australian Case’, Political Studies, 50 (2002), 80101CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Fox, Ruth, Kalitowski, Susanna, Korris, Matt and Atkins, Nicola, The Audit of Political Engagement 6: The 2009 Report (London: Hansard Society, 2009), pp. 1920Google Scholar; Keaney, Emily and Rogers, Ben, A Citizen’s Duty: Voter Inequality and the Case for Compulsory Voting (London: Institute for Public Policy Research, 2006), p. 5Google Scholar. http://www.ippr.org.

5 Rogers, Ben, ‘Turnout is Really about Class: Compulsory Voting Would Give the Less Well Off a Stronger Political Voice’, Guardian, 14 May 2005, p. 20Google Scholar.

6 Lever, , ‘Compulsory Voting’, p. 914Google Scholar.

7 This provokes questions: What are the constitutive features of a democracy? How are democratic institutions justified? Since ‘political equality’ is an ‘intrinsic value’ of democracy ( Weale, Albert, Democracy (London: Macmillan, 1999), p. 42CrossRefGoogle Scholar), then the undisputed capacity of compulsory voting to serve this value in terms of election turnout provides a powerful justification for compelling people to vote.

8 Louth, Jonathon and Hill, Lisa, ‘Compulsory Voting in Australia: Turnout With and Without It’, Australian Review of Public Affairs, 6 (2005), 2537Google Scholar.

9 Lever, , ‘Compulsory Voting’, p. 907Google Scholar.

10 Lever, , ‘Compulsory Voting’, p. 912Google Scholar.

11 Lever, , ‘Compulsory Voting’, pp. 909–10Google Scholar.

12 Lever, , ‘Compulsory Voting’, p. 911Google Scholar.

13 Henn, Matt and Weinstein, Mark, ‘Youth and Voting Behaviour in Britain’ (paper prepared for the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, 2001), pp. 19–20Google Scholar. See http://pro.harvard.edu/papers/050/050001HennMatt00.pdf

14 Lever, , ‘Compulsory Voting’, p. 909Google Scholar.

15 Lever, , ‘Compulsory Voting’, pp. 911–12Google Scholar.

16 Lever, , ‘Compulsory Voting’, p. 906Google Scholar.

17 Verba, S. and Nie, N. H., Participation in America: Political Democracy and Social Equality (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 338Google Scholar.

18 Dean Burnham, Walter, ‘The Turnout Problem’, in A. James Reichly, ed., Elections American Style (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1987), pp. 97133Google Scholar, at p. 99.

19 These findings tend to contradict Lever’s imputation that compulsory voting achieves ‘nothing more than raise turnout’, if that. See Chong, Alberto and Olivera, Mauricio, ‘On Compulsory Voting and Income Inequality in a Cross-Section of Countries’, Working Paper No. 533 (Washington, D.C.: Inter-American Development Bank Research Department, 2005)Google Scholar; and also Mueller, Dennis C. and Stratmann, Thomas, ‘The Economic Effects of Democratic Participation’, Journal of Public Economics, 87 (2003), 21292155CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Ciccone, Anthony, ‘The Constitutional Right to Vote is Not a Duty’, Hamline Journal of Public Law and Policy, 23 (2002), 325357Google Scholar, pp. 325 and 328

21 United States Supreme Court, Evans v. Cornman, 398 U.S. 419 (1970), p. 422.

22 Lever, , ‘Compulsory Voting’, p. 910Google Scholar.

23 Pettit, Philip, ‘Analytical Philosophy’, in Robert E. Goodin and Philip Pettit, eds, A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1995), pp. 738Google Scholar, at p. 32.

24 Pettit, Philip, ‘Consequentialism’, in P. Singer, ed., A Companion to Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 230240Google Scholar, at p. 231.

25 Lever, , ‘Compulsory Voting’, p. 912Google Scholar.

26 Lever, , ‘Compulsory Voting’, p. 910Google Scholar.

27 Hill, ‘On the Reasonableness of Compelling Citizens to Vote’.

28 Calabresi, Guido and Douglas Melamed, A., ‘Property Rules, Liability Rules and Inalienability: One View of the Cathedral’, Harvard Law Review, 85 (1972), 10891128CrossRefGoogle Scholar, p. 1113.

29 Goodin, Robert, Political Theory and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 49Google Scholar.

30 Lever, , ‘Compulsory Voting’, pp. 911–12Google Scholar.

31 Anonymous, ‘The Case for Compulsory Voting in the United States’, Harvard Law Review, 121 (2007), 591612Google Scholar, p. 599; Fellman, David, The Defendant’s Rights Today (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), p. 182Google Scholar.

32 Kreimer, Seth F., ‘The Problem of Negative Rights in a Positive State’, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 132 (1984), 12931397CrossRefGoogle Scholar, p. 1387.

33 Kreimer, , ‘The Problem of Negative Rights’, pp. 1387–8Google Scholar.

34 Anonymous, ‘The Case for Compulsory Voting’, p. 600Google Scholar.

Full text views

Full text views reflects PDF downloads, PDFs sent to Google Drive, Dropbox and Kindle and HTML full text views.

Total number of HTML views: 11
Total number of PDF views: 201 *
View data table for this chart

* Views captured on Cambridge Core between September 2016 - 26th November 2020. This data will be updated every 24 hours.

Hostname: page-component-57c975d4c7-bk9jx Total loading time: 0.751 Render date: 2020-11-26T01:41:51.708Z Query parameters: { "hasAccess": "0", "openAccess": "0", "isLogged": "0", "lang": "en" } Feature Flags last update: Thu Nov 26 2020 00:46:48 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) Feature Flags: { "metrics": true, "metricsAbstractViews": false, "peerReview": true, "crossMark": true, "comments": false, "relatedCommentaries": false, "subject": true, "clr": false, "languageSwitch": false }

Send article to Kindle

To send this article to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle.

Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

On the Justifiability of Compulsory Voting: Reply to Lever
Available formats
×

Send article to Dropbox

To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your <service> account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox.

On the Justifiability of Compulsory Voting: Reply to Lever
Available formats
×

Send article to Google Drive

To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your <service> account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive.

On the Justifiability of Compulsory Voting: Reply to Lever
Available formats
×
×

Reply to: Submit a response


Your details


Conflicting interests

Do you have any conflicting interests? *