Should Voting be Mandatory? Democratic Decision Making from the Economic Viewpoint

Many decisions are made by voting. At first glance, the more people participate in the voting process, the more democratic – and hence, better – the decision. In this spirit, to encourage everyone’s participation, several countries make voting mandatory. But does mandatory voting really make decisions better for the society? In this paper, we show that from the viewpoint of decision making theory, it is better to allow undecided voters not to participate in the voting process. We also show that the voting process would be even better – for the society as a whole – if we allow partial votes. This provides a solid justification for a semi-heuristic “fuzzy voting” scheme advocated by Bart Kosko. Need for democratic decision making. Often, a social entity faces a problem, and there are several alternative ways to solve this problem. For example, to build a new baseball stadium, the city can either use the existing funds or issue a bond – and hope that the future profits from this stadium will pay off this bond. In many such cases, the decision is made by voting: the choice is placed on a ballot, and the solution is decided by a majority vote. Voting is beneficial not only in the social life: there is a body of research showing that students perform better in a democratic classroom, where they are actively involved in day-by-day pedagogical decisions; see, e.g., [2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]. Which form of democratic decision making is the best? Does the democratic process always leads to a solution which is the best for the population? No doubt, democracy is better than tyranny, and a decision made with people’s participation is better than a decision made by the rulers without the people’s input, but democracy can mean many different things, and it is not a priori clear which form of democratic decision making is the best. For example, some countries (like Australia) force its citizens to vote, imposing fines and other penalties for not voting, while in the US, voting is voluntary.