Could a compulsory voting system combat political apathy in Europe?

Last month’s poll on the Generation Europe website revealed that 30% of you do not get involved in politics. Over 20% of you said you don’t believe in political parties. Although lower than the European average, it reflects a more worrying trend across Europe, where 67% of young people between 18 and 24 didn’t vote in the European elections of 2004 (compared to 54.3% on average). Whereas turnout for European elections is marginally lower than for local or national elections in European members states, these numbers do suggest considerable political apathy, especially amongst young Europeans.

In your opinion, is voting a civic duty or is it a civil right? Do you believe a compulsory voting system could endow the EU with more legitimacy or do you agree with the suggestion that a low turnout for European elections demonstrates dissatisfaction with the political process? Would compulsory voting restore the confidence of voters in the political system and encourage them to be better informed? Could a compulsory voting system combat political apathy in Europe?

Low voter turnout has reignited the debate on whether voting should be compulsory or not. Whereas compulsory voting can be seen to guarantee the election by the people of a government that represents the majority of the population, some would consider it as an infringement on the basic freedom of citizens. Elected political leaders of a compulsory system can arguably claim greater legitimacy than those elected in an election with low voter turnout. On the other hand, compulsory voting forces people with insufficient political knowledge or no specific preference to cast their vote, often resulting in protest votes for radical parties. Furthermore, not voting in itself can be considered a political act, indicating satisfaction (or possibly dissatisfaction) with the status quo. In Europe, only three countries - Belgium, Cyprus and Liechtenstein - enforce compulsory voting (not enforced in Luxemburg, Greece and Italy).

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 Further Reading:

• www.opendemocracy.net; 5/10/2007, Suzy Dean, “Compulsory voting: the case against”.
• www.opendemocracy.net; 5/10/2007, Fiona MacTaggart, “Compulsory voting: the case for".
• www.bbc.co.uk, 30/01/2003, Mark Davies, “Call for compulsory voting”.
• www.euractiv.com; 27/09/2007, “Parliament seeks to cure voter apathy by 2009”.

Sources:

• Previous GE poll results: Do you get involved in politics?
• Eurobarometer 162 on the European Parliament Elections 2004, inluding voter turnout and apathy

Compulsory voting? The wrong answer!

What is compulsory is usually something that people do not like and if they are resisting to it there must be a reason. Very often when under pressure or compulsion people tend to resist even harder.

Voting should be an act and expression of free will. The free will of people is also not to vote, so making voting compulsory would be against this principle. On the other hand, a majority of people do not vote because they do not have confidence in the individuals who rule and do not like their politics. They very often believe that things will not change no matter to whom they give their voices.

So what is crucial here is to have a ruling structure that people can feel confident about, that will justify the entrusted confidence, respond to people’s expectations and needs and there will not be necessary to consider compulsory voting system. Tatjana Slijepcevic, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Let's drop the "nothing ever happens" attitude!

Wherever we go to England, France, the USA, Malta or Romania, the voting system is considered as an instrument of communication between governments and citizens which provides the possibility of directly translating people’s interests and preferences, their needs and priorities. But we are all aware of the fact that today we are living a political crisis regarding the representation as well as the citizens’ participation.

In my opinion voting should be part of one’s most important decisions, taking into account the complexity of this process and giving legitimacy to the political leaders. A true statement is the fact that voting reflects one’s right to decide and freely express one’s opinion, the respect of human rights being a condition for democracy. We shouldn’t neglect either that a majority elected by a larger number of people has more credibility and success in its actions.

But, what really counts for our society is that few voters seem conscious of the issue's importance and, instead of introducing the compulsory voting system, I believe an efficient solution should be a better democratic education of the citizens in order to make them realise that they have in their hands the key of representation and the power of changing, reinforcing or influencing the decision-making process only by expressing their vote. 

People’s refusal to participate in the voting system is either a consequence of their indifference towards the “promised land” and dreams promised by the candidates, or the bad results of the inefficient process of mobilisation to the real priorities of our community. It is very important for people to be aware of their duties whilst at the same time receiving a better civic education, so that citizens can vote being conscious of their decision. 

In conclusion, I strongly believe that our society needs a new challenge in order to intensify the public consciousness of political participation. The compulsory voting system is not the new step we should consider; on the contrary, political parties and leaders should focus on their campaigns on issues that reflect better citizens’ interests and priorities, giving them stronger reasons to drop the “nothing ever happens!” attitude and vote for the ones they want from the onset of the political game. Liana Ionita, Romania

How many people died to ensure the right to vote?

I think that every country has had many heroes who gave their life in the name of democracy, fighting to obtain the right to vote.

Here in Italy there is an awful situation: young people are confused and more often, they just deny themselves the right to elect the best government. 

Voting is a moral duty and first of all it is a gift. We young people just don't care too much about that maybe because we have never lived in a country where a violent system like dictatorship rules. Maybe the problem is that we have never seen thousands people die to elect a government. Sometimes I think it would be better to experience something so violent and cruel. 

To sum up, i think that a compulsory voting system would be the best mean to fight against political apathy. People should feel obliged to take part in the public and political situation. What can we build, if we just don't care about our destiny? 

People in old Greece were obliged to take part in the political life of the POLIS. I mean, i think that when people who have the chance of not voting or of voting, they surely choose the first one. Why? Because it's easier to be indifferent than to be interested in our own things and problems.
So, i think that somehow it's better to make a wrong choice than not to make it at all. Chiara Palieri, Italy

Voting is very important part of making any decision.

Nowadays it’s getting harder and harder to convince people that they have influence on politics. Most of our society don’t belive they are able to change something and they don’t realize that each vote is incredibly vital because the more people cast a vote the more possible is that issues of our counrtries and societies change for better. On the other hand quite big part of society is simply too lazy to go to the polling station. Instead, they sit at home and just complain about politics and government. Other problem is that young people aren’t interested in politics. They don’t care about it and disregard it.

Making vote compulsory is not very effective way to prompt people to vote. Many people anyway didn’t  cast a vote and it would create another problem – how to punish these rebels? It only will make a fuss of voting and won’t sort out that problem.

Maybe better solution would be symbolically rewarding each voting person and introduce to schools some programs about current government activities to encourage youth to vote. Diana Wiśniewska, Poland

Changes have to be replied with changes: citizenship education and participative democracy.

European societies are involved in deep changing process since the Second World War ended. In this process, the concept of youth has changed overall. Nowadays, young people wait more time to form a family. Who want, receive a better and more available education than their – our – parents received. But we can’t realize how with this frame, which seems to be the best to implicate young people in politics, they prefer not to participate, not to vote specially.

At first, the system is based in political parties and political parties have to change the channels they use to communicate with the citizenship. The legitimism of democracy is at stake. I don’t know how, but political parties have to get adapted to a new situation in which ideology or social class belonging are not the decision-makers of the orientation of our votes, while feel empathy to this or that political party has always been an important issue in order to feel wills to go to vote.

More fundamental is education, citizenship education. Young people have to realize how important is participating. Force them to vote create an unreal situation where people participate because they want to avoid possible penalties. In the moment we have people believer in the importance of participate then it’s the time to develop the participation channels they need. Some places are developing participative budgets or participative experiences like Project CLEAR (http://www.ipeg.org.uk/papers/clear_sept06.pdf), specially at local level, but the success of these kinds of activities are restricted by the first step – long step, by the way – which they have jumped, education.

A compulsory voting system is just the fast way to have a statistics which say that a 99% of people participate in elections, while the most of them will continue feeling apathy. Joaquín Sánchez, Spain

Not to vote is also a vote made by free choice.

People who doesn't know themselves what compulsory voting is like are quite happy. They have real benefit from democracy and civil freedom.

Not to vote is also a vote made by free choice. Forcing someone to vote deteriorates the whole idea of constitutional freedom. Violating the right for freedom of voting may result not only in protest voting for radical candidates but also in voting "against all" or making bulletins invalid.

This is not the best way to make people more politically active.

So what else can we do to bring more value to the elections? First of all we should make elections more accessible to modern people. Look at Estonia - they have implemented an electronic voting system as part of country's IT development. Another point of concern is lack of feedback from the elected delegates to the people. This looks like a delegate forgets about his' supporters next day after elections and motivates people negatively to the next elections. Sergei Chernooki, Belarus

In my opinion, voting is a civic duty and is a civil right.

I believe a brand new voting system could endow the EU with more legitimacy, but I don't agree with the suggestion that a low turnout for European elections demonstrates dissatisfaction with the political process. This new voting can restore the confidence of voters in the political system and encourage them to be better informed.

OK. To be a little more specific, I'd like to answer this hard question. These days, people have seen politics more vividly as ever before. This is the first challenge. The second is Europe culture has endowed a context for such a situation. The last is that we cannot make the voting system compulsory. This is like baby-sittering and can be made fun of in generations later. Reachious Smith, China