Isolating the Effect of Compulsory Voting Laws on Political Sophistication: Exploiting Intra-National Variation in Mandatory Voting Laws between the Austrian Provinces

Abstract

A legal requirement to vote successfully increases voter turnout, decreasing disparities between voters and non-voters, and causing significant changes in the composition of the active electorate. There is an active debate over whether this institutionally driven expansion of the electorate will improve civic culture or, on the contrary, flood elections with political ignorance. This paper estimates the effect of compulsory voting laws on individual-level political sophistication through a comparative case study that exploits changing mandatory voting regulations across the Austrian Provinces over time. A theoretical section outlines four causal mechanisms through which compulsory voting should increase political information. The empirical section constructs novel measures intended to quantify long-term and short-term exposure to compulsory voting laws. The results suggest that exposure to mandatory voting laws caused citizens to increase their political interest and attention to political news, as well as their level of information about party platforms on EU integration. However, compulsory voting had no effect on citizens’ ability to identify the left-right ideological position of the major political parties.