For someone like me who studies elections and electoral rules, the first thing that comes to mind when I hear ‘Australia’ is …compulsory voting, and Australia is the first country that comes to mind when I hear ‘compulsory voting’.

For someone coming from Noth America, the idea of forcing people to vote is strange. In Canada, we have a Charter of Rights, our sole duties being to respect the rights of other citizens. Because it looks so strange, it is also very intriguing, and it attracts those of us with an anthropological bent. It would be cool to spend a year in Australia to better understand how this strange institution works in practice.

We also know that this strange institution actually works. We see the very high turnout registered in Australia. We presume that Australians, despite having some odd institutions, are not that different from us, and so this phenomenal turnout rate must be the consequence of this very peculiar rule. And some of us know that turnout did decline very substantially when compulsory voting was abolished in the Netherlands in 1970.

We know that compulsory voting works but we don’t know how exactly. We assume that quite a few people, like in our country, would prefer not to vote. We can also easily understand that most of these people prefer to vote if abstaining means that they have to pay a fine of $50. But we are told that the great majority of abstainers do not pay a fine and that the authorities will  accept almost any reason that the abstainers provide for not having voted.

Many questions arise : Are people informed or misinformed about how the law is implemented? Do people know that it is easy not to pay a fine if they don’t vote? Do they know what reasons for not voting are accepted and which are not? How accurate or inaccurate are their perceptions? Or are Australians socialized to the norm that one should vote in an election and conform to the norm, irrespective of the fines?

We need to know a lot more about how compulsory voting actually works in Australia, especially from the citizens’ perspective. Compulsory voting is a success : the goal of increasing turnout is achieved at a low cost. Social scientists are usually attracted by failures but it is also our task to explain successes.

We also need to know whether compulsory voting works differently in Australia than in other countries. We badly need a rigorous comparative examination of compulsory voting in Belgium and Australia. I have the impression, from casual conversations with researchers from the two countries, that there are some important differences in the way that the law is implemented. Fines, for instance, seem to be more frequent in Australia than in Belgium. Why? Does this affect the way people react in the two countries?

The last step in this inquiry would be to move to Latin America, the region where compulsory voting is the most frequent, and where there are wide variations in the manner in which the law is (or is not) implemented. There are fascinating comparisons to make between Latin American countries (especially between countries that also have compulsory or voluntary registration) and also between Latin America and Australia.

I make a plea for Australian political scientists to pay more attention to their most original electoral institution, compulsory voting. The fact that it works should not be the end of the story. We need to know how and why.
I argued at the outset that for a North American compulsory voting is a strange institution. I should qualify the assertion. Even in countries where voting is voluntarily, an overwhelming majority of citizens agree with the statement that it is the duty of every citizen to vote in an election. I have argued in my own research that sense of civic duty is the most powerful motivation for voting. Is this not what the Australian law says? Should we be surprised that the Australians put their principles into law?

Professor André Blais is Canada Research Chair in electoral studies at the University of Montreal, Canada.