The Side Effects of Compulsory Voting on Citizens’ Sense of Duty

The Side Effects of Compulsory Voting on

Citizens’ Sense of Duty

by

Arturo Maldonado

Department of Political Science

Vanderbilt University

[email protected]

Abstract

Incentives cast as rewards or punishments frequently motivate human behavior, including political behavior. An ample branch of research in psychology, education, and management has analyzed the detrimental effect of rewards and punishments in people’s behavior. According to this line of research, when people face rewards or punishments, their performance increases, but their motivation suffers a decline. In this paper I apply this idea to the electoral context in countries with compulsory voting where states implement punishments over non-voters. Following this line of thought, I hypothesize that when the statethreatens citizens with a fine if they do not vote, voters’

performance increases, expressed in more voters going to the polls, but citizens’ intrinsic motivation falls. I test this expectation using a survey experiment in Peru, a country with compulsory voting and varying levels of enforcements, in which I expose subjects to treatments intended to prime these different enforcements. The results support expectations: when people are reminded about punishments, they show lower levels of duty and a deteriorated opinion that voting is important to preserve democracy. Moreover, the effect is monotonic: the harder the punishment, the lower the intrinsic motivation to vote and the lower citizens’ opinion about the importance to vote for preserving democracy.

Introduction

Countries implement compulsory voting to increase turnout in

elections and ward off democratic illnesses such as biased

electoral participation and non-representative elected officials.

In his presidential address for the American Political Science

Association, Lijphart (1997), stated that compulsory voting is a

valid mechanism to solve the problem of “unequal turnout that is

systematically biased against less well-to-do citizens.” (1)

Indeed, turnout data support the expectation that this rule

increases turnout: countries that implement it exhibit higher

levels of turnout than countries with voluntary voting, even

though they do not exhibit full participation. Birch (2009) finds

an average increase in turnout of 13.7 percent after the

introduction of compulsory voting and Fornos et al. (2004) shows

in Latin American countries with compulsory voting that “turnout

is found to be about 20% higher than turnout in countries with

voluntary voting in both legislative and presidential elections,

controlling for the effect of other independent variables.” (932)

In sum, that compulsory voting raises turnout is a well-

established fact. However, the literature discusses several

others second-order effects of compulsory voting at the

individual level and at the polity level that are highly debated

among scholars. For instance, Birch (2009) also proposes that

mandatory voting may affect some individual-level variables such

as satisfaction with democracy, female representation, and

partisan support and Loewen et al. (2008) analyze the effect of

this electoral rule on political knowledge, but they do not find

evidence that mandatory voting leads to more informed citizens.

At the polity level, for example, Power and Roberts (1995) look

for factors that explain the increasing level of invalid ballots

in compulsory voting countries and Mackerras and McAllister

(1999) find that compulsory voting favors leftist parties. The

idea behind these second-order effects is that compulsory voting

pushes people who otherwise would be less likely to vote, but who

are more likely to vote for certain candidates or parties, such

as female representatives (women) and leftist parties (poor

people). These people at the same time feel some pressure from

this electoral rule to become more informed and to be able to

cast a correct ballot. Also, mandatory voting may affect voters’

satisfaction with democracy because voters may feel part of the

political community and part of the decision to elect officials.

In this paper I propose to analyze the impact of compulsory

voting on a new dimension: the citizens’ motivation to vote. I

draw on and extend an ample literature about the effects of

punishments and rewards on citizens’ performance and motivation.

This branch of literature has basically found that rewards and

punishment actually increases performance, but they also decrease

the intrinsic motivation to perform an activity. I apply this

idea to the electoral context and assume that compulsory voting

works as a threat of punishment –a fine if a citizen does not

vote. I then expect that this rule increases performance, as it

actually does –a higher turnout-, but it also decreases the

citizens’ intrinsic motivation to perform the activity –voting in

this case. I argue that intrinsic motivation is a concept closer

to the citizens’ sense of duty and thus I expect to find lower

levels of sense of duty among those who experience the threat of

punishments for not voting than among those who do not experience

this threat. Additionally, I expect that this decline in

motivation leads to a deterioration of the citizens’ opinion

about the importance of voting to preserve democracy in the

country.

Moreover, I suggest that this threat is particularly salient

among those who present higher values on an authoritarian scale.

Research on authoritarianism has found that authoritarian

personalities are more sensitive to threats coming from the

environment. As a result, they may experience the obligation to

vote as a severer threat than people who score low in an

authoritarian scale. Thus, I expect to find lower levels of

citizens’ sense of duty and opinion about the importance of

voting among authoritarians than among non-authoritarians.

Punishments and Rewards

A conventional economic view says that incentives, either

positive like rewards or negative like punishments, are good

because they increase performance. This view has been debated

from other disciplines, such as psychology, education, and

management, in which research has found that extrinsic incentives

have some side effects, specifically they affect the intrinsic

motivation to perform an activity. Thus, what are the side

effects of penalizations for not voting in compulsory voting

countries?

Incentives take two forms: rewards or punishments. The

literature discusses whether they are the two sides of the same

coin, whether they increase performance, and whether they

decrease motivation. The seminal piece in this line of research

is Deci (1971), who finds that extrinsic motivations -rewards in

the form of money- affect intrinsic motivations. However, he did

not test whether his findings stay for punishments and more

recently his results have been disputed (Cameron and Pierce

1994).

On the punishment side of the coin, the results are non

conclusive. They even argue the idea that negative incentives

increase performance. For instance Gneezy and Rustichini (1998)

find that punishments actually decrease the occurrence of a

behavior (performance), but it did so only temporarily. These

scholars, however, do not test the effect of punishments on

motivation.

Research has also distinguished between two types of

incentives: contingent and non-contingent incentives, and

scholars have tested for the shifting effects of these types of

incentives on performance and motivation. Contingent incentives

mean that rewards or punishments depend on performance. If an

employee performs well, he is rewarded or if he performs poorly,

he is punished. The literature also has understood non-contingent

incentives in two ways: as arbitrary rewards and punishments or

as not previously announced. In the first case, rewards and

punishments are given independently of how well or poorly an

employee has performed. In the second case, employees do not know

they are going to be rewarded or punished if they perform well or

poorly; so the prize or the penalty come as a surprise.

Podsakoff et al. (1984) analyze all the combinations:

contingent and non-contingent rewards and punishments, and their

effects on performance and satisfaction. Podsakoff and his

colleagues understand non-contingent as arbitrary incentives and

find that contingent rewards increase both performance and

satisfaction, noncontingent punishments decrease satisfaction but

no performance, and noncontingent rewards and contingent

punishments do not affect performance and satisfaction.

In the context of this paper, compulsory voting establishes

a contingent punishment for not voting. If a voting-age citizen

does not vote –what I understand as if he does not perform well-,

the state institutes a contingent penalty: a fee or a civic

penalization. Even though there is not a consensus about the

effect of contingent punishment on citizens’ motivation (Atwater

1997), I take Deci’s findings and hypothesize that this

contingent penalty will increase performance, but it will

decrease motivation.

An alternative perspective discusses how monetary rewards

change a behavior from the realm of social norms to the world of

monetary markets (Heyman and Ariely 2004). They find that effort

increases with payment level, but when money is not invoked

effort is at a high level and is independent of rewards. Along

this line, Vohn (2006) states that money affects positively one’s

motivation, but negatively behavior toward others. When money is

invoked, people tend to be less helpfulness toward others, to

play and work alone, and to prefer being free of dependency and

dependents.

Accordingly, it is fair to say that voting could be in both

realms. It implies cost and benefits, but also involves a sense

of duty. When the state applies a monetary punishment for not

voting, it may introduce a clash between the realm of social

norms (voting as a personal contribution to a common good) and

the realm of market norms (costs and benefits of voting) and may

affect negatively the behavior toward others. Thus, it may imply

a decrease in the motivation to vote, an act that favors the

common good.

Closer to the idea in this paper, Panagopoulus (2013)

applies findings about rewards and punishments to the electoral

behavior. He analyzes the impact of an extrinsic (monetary)

reward on voting. He hypothesizes that extrinsic incentives

depress intrinsic motivation, what he call crowding out. He

inspects the effect of monetary incentives on turnout, randomly

assigning voters to receive either a postcard with a simple

reminder to vote or an offer to receive a financial reward, but

he does not find significant effects on turnout and he then

concludes, “monetary rewards do not appear to be notably

effective in stimulating voting than many other types of

interventions.” (278) The study is innovative, but limited to the

extent that measures of performance and motivation are

confounded. Turnout is the activity being incentivized by

monetary rewards, so it is close to what Deci calls performance

and it increases with extrinsic incentives. What decreases is

intrinsic motivation, which is not turnout since demotivated

people may go to vote for other reasons (especially in compulsory

voting countries, but also in non-compulsory systems where social

pressures or other forces might induce turnout).

Moreover, I consider that the duty term in the rational

calculus of voting is similar to what intrinsic motivation means

in the literature of rewards and punishments: voting driven by

enjoyment of exercising rights and fulfilling citizens’

responsibilities. Riker and Ordeshook (1968) state that the sense

of duty is a term related to the citizens’ internal satisfaction

of doing their civic duties. They define duty as an intrinsic

reward for the act of voting and being part of the political

community, regardless of any utilitarian benefit obtained. Later,

scholars have differentiated between intrinsic motivation and

extrinsic motivation, both components of the D term. Both

branches of research understand intrinsic motivation as an

internal fuel that triggers political participation. The rational

calculus literature has assumed extrinsic motivations as the

social pressure the voter receive to fulfill his duties and

scholars have worked inducing feelings of pride and shame in Get-

out-the-vote studies (Gerber, Green, and Larimer 2008; Gerber,

Green, and Larimer 2010; Bond et al. 2012). The rewards and

punishment literature, on its part, has understood extrinsic

motivations often as monetary incentives: offering money to

perform an activity, voting in this case. So, as Panagopoulus

(2013) suggest, contingent rewards are close to turnout and vote

buying.

Finally, Heyman and Ariely (2004) find that effort increases

with payment, a monetary reward. I propose that contingent

punishments and motivation show a monotonic negative

relationship. When punishments are more severe, I expect to

observe a higher decline in the intrinsic motivation.

Punishments and authoritarianism

The relationship between threats and authoritarianism has

been amply documented (Feldman and Stenner 1997; Lavine et al.

2005). This line of research, mostly on political psychology, has

found that those who score high on an authoritarian measure are

particular sensitive to threat coming from the environment.

Lavine et al. (1999) determines that authoritarian personalities

are more likely to see a threat message (negative consequences of

failing to vote) as having more quality than a reward message

(positive benefits of voting). Therefore, a clear negative

consequence of no voting in compulsory voting systems is the

established penalties for those who do not go to the polls. Thus,

this threat may be particularly salient for authoritarians and

then the effect may be amplified. Consequently, I hypothesize a

higher decline in motivation and in the opinion about the

importance of voting to preserve democracy among authoritarians

than among non-authoritarians.

Following, I will present the hypotheses I will test:

Hypothesis 1: Citizens exposed to penalties for not voting will

present on average lower levels of intrinsic motivation to vote

than voters who are not exposed to such penalties.

Hypothesis 2: Citizens exposed to higher penalties will show lower

levels of intrinsic motivation to vote than citizens exposed to

lower penalties.

Hypothesis 3: Authoritarians exposed to penalties for not voting

will display a higher decline in their levels of intrinsic

motivation than non-authoritarian citizens.

Data

The data used in this paper come from a survey carried out

in Lima, Peru –a country with compulsory voting with varying

types of enforcement-, in which 760 voting-age citizens were

selected using a complex sample design and were interviewed face

to face.

In this survey, I introduced an experiment in which I

randomly assigned subjects to one of three different messages,

intending to prime the consequences of not voting: a reminder of

receiving a monetary fee (N=189), a reminder of receiving civic

penalties (N=190), or a reminder of both types of penalties

(N=193). The control group (N=188) did not receive a reminder of

the enforcement. After treatment, respondents were asked

questions about whether voting is an option or a duty and

questions about the importance of voting to preserve democracy in

the country. My key dependent variable is an index developed by

Achen and Blais (2012) based on two related question about duty

and that I have calculated from this dataset. The first question

asked respondents to answer whether voting is first and foremost

a duty or a choice. If they respond duty, then the second

question asked respondents to evaluate how strongly they feel

that voting is a duty, from not very strong to somewhat strong

and very strongly. I combined these two questions to create an

index called level of duty that goes from 0 that means voting is

a choice to 3 that means that voting is a strong duty. The

average duty is 2 and the standard deviation is 1.

Additionally, I include a question to gauge the importance

of voting to preserve democracy in a 1-7 scale. The mean of this

variable is 6.2 and its standard deviation is 1.1. The

authoritarian predispositions are measured by three questions

that ask about child-rearing values (whether a child must obey

his parents, whether a child must respect the elderly, and

whether a child must have good manners). I combine these three

questions to build an index that goes from 0 to 3 where higher

values indicate more authoritarian predispositions.

In the dataset, there were no differences in age, proportion

of women, educational level, self-placement in the left-right

scale, and child-rearing values, verified by separate t-tests.

However, the control condition presents significantly more

affluent people than the treatments conditions and people with

higher authoritarian predispositions. The following analyses

control for this imbalance in order to ensure that income and

authoritarian effects are not confounded with treatment.

Analyses and Results

The following analyses examine the effect of reminders of

penalties for not voting on citizens’ sense of duty. Table 1

presents the coefficients of the dummy variables for each

treatment: monetary fees, civic penalties, and fees and civic

penalties, controlling for income and authoritarian

predispositions on two dependent variables: the respondents’

level of duty and the importance of voting.

In the control condition, the average level of duty is 2.07.

Those exposed to threats of punishments exhibit lower levels of

duty, as the negative signs indicate; and they decrease

monotonically with the severity of the penalty, from the reminder

of monetary fees to civic penalties and both. Those exposed to

the reminder of the harshest penalty –fees plus civic penalties-

have 0.14 less points on average on this index than those in the

control condition and this difference is statistically

significant at one-tailed p<0.1.1 When the model includes

controls for income and authoritarian predispositions, the

monotonicity persists, but the differences between each treatment

and the control group are not statistically significant.

In examining the effect of treatments on importance to vote,

those in the treatment groups present lower levels of importance

1 I will use one-tailed tests in the following analyses because all my hypotheses are directional. So, I just need one tail of the distribution to reject the null hypothesis.

of voting on average than those in the control group. They

decrease also monotonically with the severity of the punishment,

so those exposed to the more severe threat show 0.13 less points

on average than those in the control condition, but this

difference is significant only at a generous level (one-tailed

p<0.15). When controlling for income and authoritarian

predispositions, the sign of reminders of both types of penalties

is still negative, but this coefficient does not reach standard

levels of significance.

Table 1: Analyses of reminders of punishments on levels of duty and importance of voting

Level ofduty(1)

Level ofduty(2)

Importanceof voting

(1)

Importanceof voting

(2)Reminder of monetary fee

-0.03(0.11)

-0.03(0.12)

-0.05(0.12)

0.06(0.13)

Reminder of civic penalties

-0.06(0.11)

-0.09(0.12)

-0.07(0.12)

0.03(0.13)

Reminder of monetary fee andcivic penalties

-0.14(0.11)

-0.09(0.12)

-0.13(0.12)

-0.10(0.13)

Income 0.04(0.02)

0.11(0.03)

Authoritarian predispositions

0.14(0.05)

0.10(0.06)

Constant 2.07 1.52 6.29 5.30Prob>F 0.58 0.11 0.72 0.00N 729 583 750 599

I then examine hypothesis 3 that states that the effect of

reminders of punishments is higher for authoritarians. To test

this hypothesis, I will interact the treatment variable with the

variable that taps respondents’ authoritarian predispositions.

The treatment variable goes from 0 to 3, where 0 means those in

the control condition and 3 means those in the hardest condition.

The authoritarian variable goes from 0 to 3, where higher values

indicate more authoritarianism. Models also include income as a

control.

The negative sign of the interactive terms indicate that

authoritarianism reduces the slope of the effect of treatment on

levels of duty and importance of voting. The interactive term,

however, is not statistically significant for level of duty, but

it is for importance to vote at one-tailed p<0.01. The results

also indicate that the effect of treatment on importance of

voting is positive for low to mid levels of authoritarianism

predispositions, except for those who show the higher level in

this variable, who are the 69% of the total respondents. For this

group, the effect of treatments on importance of voting is

negative and it reveals that the harder the punishment, the lower

the score on importance of voting.2

Table 2: Analyses of reminders of punishments and authoritarianism on levels of duty and importance of voting

Level of duty Importance of votingTreatment 0.078

(0.13)0.30

(0.14)Authoritarian predispositions

0.20(0.08)

0.28(0.09)

Treatment x Authoritarianpredispositions

-0.04(0.05)

-0.13(0.05)

Income 0.04(0.02)

0.11(0.03)

Constant 1.36(0.29)

4.85(0.33)

Prob>F 0.05 0.00N 583 599

Summary and Conclusions

Participation is a key component of a modern democracy.

Actually, Freedom House includes the right to vote for distinct

alternatives in competitive elections as one criterion for

building its index. Then, because electoral participation is

2 When authoritarian predispositions are 0 to 2, the sign of the coefficient of treatment is positive. Inversely, when authoritarian predisposition equals 3, the sign of the coefficient of treatment on duty is negative.

normatively desirable for a democracy, compulsory voting is

proposed as a rule to improve this required characteristic. This

direct effect is supported by ample evidence, but supporters of

this electoral rule and lawmakers have not considered that

mandatory voting may also have some side effects that can be

counterproductive to the initial expectations of its advocates.

This paper goes beyond the direct effect of compulsory voting:

the increasing levels of turnout –a positive quantitative

effect-, and evaluates a potential side effect of compulsory

voting: a decrease in voters’ intrinsic motivation to turn out –a

negative qualitative effects.

This analysis suggests that when citizens are primed with

reminders of the punishments for not voting, they experience a

decline in their intrinsic sense of duty and in their opinion

about the importance of voting to preserve democracy. This

finding is in line with the psychological view that proposes that

extrinsic motivations, such as negative incentives (punishments),

deteriorate intrinsic motivations. In his seminal piece Deci

(1971) finds that monetary external rewards affect the intrinsic

motivation to perform an activity. In this paper, I have applied

this idea to the electoral context in countries with compulsory

voting in which voters experience a threat of punishment if they

do not vote and I find similar results. Deci (1971), however,

uses rewards while this paper applies reminders of punishments.

The literature discusses about whether rewards and punishments

have similar effects on the intrinsic motivation, or whether they

have particular effects. Even though Podsakoff et al. (1984) find

that contingent punishments are not related to performance or

satisfaction, this relationship has not been tested in the

electoral context. This paper finds some evidence that what Deci

(1971) finds for the effect of rewards on the intrinsic

motivation also applies for punishments in countries with

compulsory voting.

Moreover, this drop seems to be exacerbated among those who

express higher authoritarian predispositions, measured through

child-rearing values, and who are a majority in Peru. Feldman and

Stenner (1997) test the hypothesis about the relationship between

threat, anxiety, and authoritarianism and find that societal

threats activate authoritarian predispositions. However,

Hetherington and Weiler (2009) challenge this finding and suggest

that it is because threat stimuli are more threatening for those

scoring high in authoritarianism. In this paper, I hypothesize

that this threat of punishment is particularly salient for more

authoritarian citizens. Data reveals that those scoring high in

the authoritarian scale have a higher decline in their intrinsic

motivation to vote and in their opinion that voting in important

to preserve democracy. Thus, compulsory voting is far from being

a societal threat, but it is an intimidation that may trigger

some levels of anxiety on voters, particularly those more

sensitive to this type of threats, and, as a result, they are

more exposed to the effect of this pressure.

Even though this survey experiment provides initial support

for expectations regarding the effect of compulsory voting on

citizens’ intrinsic motivation, additional studies are necessary

for a comprehensive test of these hypotheses, particularly

whether these findings are robust to other settings (other

compulsory voting countries) and other measures of intrinsic

motivation to vote.

Moreover, a research agenda should include the analysis of

rewards in the electoral context. Colombia, for example,

incentivizes some groups of citizens with rewards for voting: a

reduced fee for university students, a reduction in the fee for a

passport, etc. According to Podsakoff et al (1984), I would

expect to find even stronger results for the effect of contingent

rewards on performance and satisfaction, but this hypothesis

remains to be tested.

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