The more,the better? Counterfactual evidence on the effect of compulsory voting on the consistency of party choice

Compulsory voting (CV) undoubtedly raises electoral turnout. Yet does it also affect individual party choices and aggregate election outcomes? Previous studies have focused on partisan or ‘directional’ effects of CV in favour of, for example, social‐democratic or anti‐establishment parties. These effects are usually small, however. Using survey data from the Belgian General Elections Study, this article finds that CV primarily affects the consistency, rather than the direction, of party choices. In particular, the analyses suggest that CV compels a substantial share of uninterested and less knowledgeable voters to the polls. These voters, in turn, cast votes that are clearly less consistent with their own political preferences than those of the more informed and motivated voluntary voters. Claims that CV promotes equal representation of political interests are therefore questionable.     

A Poverty of Imagination: Blaming the Poor for Inequality

Inequality in Britain today is now so deep that the top 10 per cent own 100 times more than the bottom 10 per cent, yet there is remarkably little public concern or anger about poverty. Indeed, compassion and concern for the poorest in society has actually declined in recent years due to the continued, and even increased, prevalence of the view that poverty is largely caused by laziness and lack of willpower, or is simply an unavoidable fact of modern life. Either way, many people tacitly accept that ‘the poor will always be with us’. Moreover, much of the British public believes that there are sufficient opportunities to succeed for those who try hard enough, and also that it is the middle class which actually struggles the most, economically or financially. These assumptions are highly conservative in their ideological and political implications because they limit public support for egalitarianism and extensive wealth redistribution from rich to poor.     

Law‐Linked Justice and Existence‐Linked Justice

Abstract. Justice as a manifestation of “the just” is an evasive concept. On the one hand there is the law, an operation run by professionals. On the other hand there are the citizens the law is meant for. Generally speaking the law strives for justice. But the law has to protect many different interests and must work through legal devices. Therefore the justice that emerges from it is necessarily a legal compromise. For the citizens the legal rules are a given reality. Generally they will agree that the law is there to achieve justice but legal arguments that justify a rule or decision cannot have the same value for them. In cases that affect them personally, justice will be a personal, existential experience, which may be incompatible with legal justice. It is hard to keep these two forms of justice under one roof. In order to make this easier this paper proposes a conceptual split between “law‐linked justice” and “existence‐linked justice.” It is argued that the law cannot in truth to its rational origin ignore the citizens’ experience of justice, out of the ordinary as they may be.