Electoral engineering and cross-national turnout differences: What role for compulsory voting?

Low electoral turnout is often considered to be bad for democracy, whether inherently or because it calls legitimacy into question or because low turnout implies lack of representation of certain groups and inegalitarian policies.(1) Yet there would appear to be a straightforward cure for low turnout: make voting compulsory. Of the twenty-five countries in the International Almanac of Electoral History for which Katz has collected institutional data, four have compulsory voting.(2) Turnout in these countries averages 89 per cent, as compared to 75 per cent in the other twenty-one countries (see Table 2, below). One country with particularly low turnout in national elections is the United States (a fact that has often caused concern among those who worry about the health of American democracy),(3) and Arend Lijphart, in his 1996 Presidential Address to the American Political Science Association, has strongly suggested that compulsory voting be adopted in that country in order to remedy the problem.(4)