Compulsory voting can save British democracy

New Statesman​

2 days ago

The July 2024 general election produced one of the most fragmented results in British history: while Labour won a huge majority, it did so on only 34% of the vote. Amidst a falling combined vote share for the two major parties, we saw the entrance of Reform MPs into Parliament, and the victory of historic numbers of Greens and independents. Since then, this fragmentation has only accelerated: Reform is now surging, while ex-Corbynites moot the formation of new challenger parties on the left; the two traditional parties of government both languish in the polls, commanding less than 50% support between them.
With the first-past-the-post electoral system increasingly failing either to keep the old party-system in place, or to force the electorate into new coherent blocs, the traditional calls for proportional representation (PR) have grown louder. Electoral reformers argue that we need a voting system in which the public's true preferences can be given free rein, and the party system allowed to naturally evolve.
While its advocates may be right that PR is an inherently fairer system, the political diagnosis behind it feels outdated. British politics is not so much defined by an institutionally-thwarted re-alignment, as by an ever more widespread phenomenon of de-alignment. Old party loyalties may be falling away, but they are not being replaced by anything new. In other words, what we are witnessing is not simply the senescence of a particular party system, but rather a more general breakdown of the relationship between citizens and the state – a breakdown that is perhaps most starkly reflected in the rising number of citizens who no longer bother voting.
This is the phenomenon that the Irish political scientist Peter Mair famously diagnosed as the 'hollowing out' of democracy, in which the collapse of traditional mediating institutions, and a 'mutual retreat' of politicians and voters from the public sphere, leaves citizens disconnected from political elites, who in turn find themselves presiding over a socio-political 'void'. In the context of the Mair-ian void, PR loses its radical edge, and risks doing little more than accelerating political fragmentation, re-arranging the distribution of seats between flimsy and hollow parties, all of which struggle to mobilise voters and fail to command lasting loyalties.
Those looking to remedy the crisis of UK democracy should therefore begin looking to an alternative (or perhaps complimentary), less-discussed approach to electoral reform: the introduction of compulsory voting. Currently used in 22 democracies across the world, compulsory voting works by making voting a duty, legally obligating eligible voters to cast a ballot, and issuing those who fail to do so with a small fine.
In the UK, compulsory voting saw a flurry of advocacy in the New Labour years, when then-unprecedentedly low levels of general election turnout saw politicians like Peter Hain, David Blunkett, and Tom Watson turn to it as a potential solution. More recently, it has been advocated by right-wing journalists like Tim Montgomerie, centrist podcasting behemoth 'The Rest is Politics', and prominent left-wing politicians like former Welsh First Minister Mark Drakeford. Last week, a new cross-party Campaign for Compulsory Voting was established, bringing together politicians, democracy activists, and academics from across the four nations of the United Kingdom.
Advocacy for compulsory voting is based on two fundamental premises. First, that the fashionable minimalist conception of democratic citizenship as consisting of nothing more than a bundle of individual rights is insufficient. The idea of compulsory voting draws instead on older notions of civic responsibility, active citizenship, and democracy as a system of mutual obligations. It is our duty as citizens to help ensure the healthy functioning of the democratic system from which we all benefit, and that means participating in elections.
Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe
Second, the case for compulsory voting is based on an understanding that within a democratic system, elections based on universal suffrage provide the central mechanism for linking individuals to the state, for aggregating public preferences, and for ensuring that governments are incentivised to serve the interests of their citizens. When voter turnout ceases to be near-universal, and instead falls to low levels, elections cease to be able to perform this function, and democracy slips into crisis.
Here in the UK, we are deep into that crisis territory. The last election saw barely more than half of eligible voters participate. Within that, data from Ipsos suggests that turnout was over 10 points higher amongst white voters than ethnic minorities, over 20 points higher amongst upper-class voters than working-class voters, and over 30 points higher amongst over-65s than under-65s, and amongst homeowners than renters.
The result is an unrepresentative electorate – richer, older, whiter, and more secure than the UK public at large. This in turn creates warped incentives for politicians, who are pushed by cold electoral logic to disproportionately prioritise the interests of an older, economically-insulated minority at the expense of the wider public. We have seen this play out in practice as pensioner benefits have been protected at the expense of working-age welfare, and as soaring asset-price inflation has gone unaccompanied by either GDP or real wage growth.
Crucially, such outcomes only exacerbate the initial problem: stagnation and inequality drive disillusionment with democratic politics, pushing more and more voters into the arms of either extremism or abstention, and leaving vast swathes of the public both alienated and disconnected from the democratic political process.
The central challenge British politics faces today is thus how to reconnect citizens with the state. The answer is unlikely to be purely constitutional – changes in how political parties, public services, and the media operate are all no doubt necessary. But political reform nonetheless has its part to play: above all, elections must once again become effective means of democratic linkage, and credible expressions of public will. For this to be the case, turnout must be both high and demographically even. With turnout as low as it is today, compulsory voting is the only reform whose impact would be on the scale necessary (in countries such as Australia where compulsory voting is used, turnout rates regularly reach over 90%).
Critics will surely object that compulsory voting is illiberal, or that it represents an unacceptable imposition on personal freedom. Such arguments should quickly be dismissed: coercion and civic obligation are an inevitable and necessary feature of democratic life. We happily accept them in the form of taxes, jury duty, or the obligation to fill out the census, so why not apply the same logic to voting, the most basic democratic act of all? Citizens would still have the option of actively abstaining by spoiling their ballot, and fines imposed on non-voters are unlikely to be onerous (in Australia they are slightly under £10).
Ultimately, such reservations should be seen as trifling in the face of the scale of the democratic crisis we face. What compulsory voting offers is a means of breaking the vicious cycle of low turnout, warped incentives, bad policy, and rising political disaffection. If compulsory voting feels like a muscular measure, so be it – it is simply what the moment demands.
Related