COMPULSORY VOTING AND GOVERNMENT SPENDING

Productive government spending, growth, and sequential voting

This paper considers an endogenous growth model with productive government spending in which overlapping generations of agents vote sequentially on policy. With sequential majority voting, there is a multiplicity of politico-economic equilibria originating from self-fulfilling policy expectations. Some of these equilibria are Pareto-inefficient and there are endogenous cycles. A constitutional ...

Government of the People: A Case for Compulsory Voting

Government Spending and Pocketbook Voting: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Romania

This paper addresses the question of whether incumbents can buy political support through targeted public spending. Using a regression discontinuity approach which takes advantage of the quasi-experimental design of a recent Romanian government program that distributed coupons worth 200 Euros to poor families towards the purchase of a computer, we find that program beneficiaries were significan...

Compulsory Voting and Income Inequality

What difference does it make if the state makes people vote? The question is central to normative debates about the rights and duties of citizens in a democracy, and to contemporary policy debates in a variety of countries over what actions states should take to encourage electoral participation. By focusing on a rare case of abolishing compulsory voting in Venezuela, we show that not forcing p...

Republican Liberty and Compulsory Voting

This paper starts from four observations: (1) voter turnout is declining in established democracies; (2) low turnout means socio-economically unequal turnout; (3) compulsory voting is an effective means to increase turnout; (4) even low-turnout countries, however, have neither introduced nor even contemplated a legal obligation to vote. A closer look at the arguments against compulsory voting s...