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By Shane Singh April 1 at 10:49 AM

Following President Obamas mention of compulsory voting at a town hall event in Cleveland a couple weeks ago, the topic has received a lot of attention in the popular media. While Obama did not clearly suggest that the U.S. should implement compulsory voting, countries including Bulgaria, Colombia, and India have actively considered its adoption in recent months.

Scholarly research finds a robust correlation between compulsory voting and turnout rates. So turnout in the U.S. would very likely increase if abstention became illegal although, as John Sides recently noted, election outcomes may not systematically change. Compulsory voting could also have other effects, such as reducing income inequality and enhancing political sophistication in the electorate.

But my ongoing research suggests that compulsory voting also has a more troubling effect: itsours attitudes toward the democratic system among those who prefer to not to vote.

The reasoning is straightforward: when people are forced to do something that they dont want to do, they often come to dislike whoever is making them do it. So those who dont want to vote may come to have less favorable attitudes toward the political system that forces them to vote.

The graph below shows this fact, drawing on AmericasBarometer survey data from Central America, North America, South America and the Caribbean. Fourteen of the countries included here have some form of mandatory voting. I classify compulsory voting laws as nonexistent (voluntary voting), weak, or strong, depending on the severity of the penalty for abstention and the likelihood of enforcement. The bars represent the percentage of people who report being dissatisfied with democracy in each type of voting system. Red bars are used for individuals who prefer to abstain, and blue bars are used for those who are inclined to vote.

Unsurprisingly, those who prefer to abstain are more dissatisfied with democracy than those who prefer to vote, regardless of whether there is compulsory voting. But those who prefer to abstain are more dissatisfied in countries with strong compulsory voting.

Of course, this correlation does not demonstrate that adopting (or abandoning) compulsory voting would necessarily cause attitudes toward democracy to change. However, I can get some additional leverage from this fact: in a handful of Latin American countries, senior citizens are exempted from the requirement to turn out. And I have found that this gap in satisfaction with democracy between those who prefer to abstain and those who prefer to turn out dissipates once people reach the age when their participation becomes voluntary.

In India, the Law Commission recently ruled out compulsory voting on the grounds that, among other things, it is undemocratic. In addition, in the dozens of opinion pieces on compulsory voting that have emerged in the United States in response to Obamas comments in Ohio, a common theme is that the right to vote also includes a right not to vote. Infringing on any right not to vote could decrease satisfaction with democracy among those who would prefer to exercise that right.

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Project againist Communism
This is a school project. IT IS NOT REAL.

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Tribute to George Lincoln Rockwell.

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Command economies took most of the blame for the economic collapse of the Soviet Union and North Korea. The lesson taken from the second half of the 20th century was that capitalism and free markets were indisputably more productive than socialism and command economies.

Three broad explanations for such failure were given: socialism failed to transform the nature of human incentives and competition; political government processes corrupted and ruined command decisions; and economic calculation was proven to be impossible in a socialist state.

Soviet revolutionary thinker Vladimir Lenin first tried to implement an economic structure that lacked competition and profits in 1917. By 1921, Lenin was forced to adopt the New Economic Plan to incorporate some form of motivation for positive production.

Political economists in the western economies often argued that such motivations were still directed incorrectly. Rather than satisfying customers, the concern of the socialist producer was to satisfy his higher-ranking political officer. This discouraged risk and innovation.

In response to concerns about high executive salaries and profits, economist Milton Friedman countered regulatory thinking by inquiring, "Is it really true that political self-interest is nobler somehow than economic self-interest?"

This argument states that concentrated power in the political realm tends to flow into the wrong hands. Leninists and Trotskyites complain that Stalinist command economies fail based on political corruption, not inherent flaws in the economic system.

In 1920, Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises wrote an article entitled "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth." Mises argued that without free markets, no correct price mechanism could form; without a price mechanism, accurate economic calculations were impossible.

Famed socialist economist Oskar Lange later admitted it was Mises's "powerful challenge" that forced socialists to try to build a system of economic accounting. After decades of trying to replicate the price mechanism in free markets, however, the Soviet Union still collapsed.

Mises responded, arguing that such attempts were doomed to failure because no monopolistic government could reasonably be "in perfect competition with itself," which is how prices arise.

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What makes command economies fail?

PRESIDENT Evo Moraless Movement Towards Socialism party (MAS) suffered a shock defeat in Bolivian capital La Paz in Sundays local government elections.

Just months after a sweeping general election win, MAS slipped up in two other provinces Santa Cruz and Tarija but won four others and is well placed to take the remaining two.

The ruling party registered victories in the provinces of Pando and Cochabamba with more than 60 per cent of the votes and in Oruro with 55 per cent of the votes. In Potosi, MAS won with 57.1 per cent.

The provinces of Beni and Chiquisaca appear to be heading for a second round on May 3, with MAS leading after Sundays vote but lacking the 10-point advantage over the second-placed candidate necessary to be declared the outright winner.

If MAS wins in a second round in the traditional opposition stronghold of Beni, it would be the first time in a decade that the province is not ruled by the right.

Vice-President Alvaro Garcia Linera blamed the defeat in La Paz on training weaknesses of local leadership, both at the departmental and municipal levels.

He praised the conduct of the elections as having been peaceful, participatory and democratic.

The MAS leader added that results nationwide reaffirmed the left-wing party as the strongest political force in the country.

Bolivias electoral authority gave preliminary figures indicating that at least 85 per cent of the more than six million registered voters participated in Sundays election.

by Our Foreign Desk

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