Mandatory voting would improve democratic outcomes in Western liberal democracies

The 'low-information voter' objection — that mandatory voting brings in ill-informed voters who cast random or reflexive ballots — doesn't hold up empirically. Studies of Australian elections find that mandatory voters (those who say they would not have voted voluntarily) make systematic choices based on economic conditions and government performance. They're not random noise. They are, however, more likely to be lower-income, younger, and from communities that voluntary systems exclude. Their preferences are valid.

The representational case: voluntary electorates are systematically biased toward older, wealthier, more politically engaged citizens. Policies reflect this. Research on Australia (mandatory since 1924) shows its government has consistently produced more redistributive outcomes than comparable voluntary-voting countries. Compulsory voting doesn't just change turnout — it changes the policy set that's politically viable, because parties can't win by mobilising a narrow base while suppressing the opposition's base.

Belgium is a hard case partly because its mandatory voting operates over a political system with deep linguistic and regional divisions that produce instability regardless of voting rules. The better comparison is Australia, which has a two-party-dominant system like the US and UK, uses mandatory voting, and has had longer average government durations and more consistent policy on long-run challenges like pension design. Institutional design context matters; cherry-picking Belgium over Australia is telling.

The right response to voter suppression and low turnout in voluntary systems is to fix the barriers: automatic registration, voting on a weekend or making it a holiday, early voting, paper trails, ending partisan gerrymandering of districts. These increase participation without coercing non-participants. The mandatory voting argument keeps slipping past the question of whether we should compel participation in the first place, as if institutional design can only work through coercion. It can't, and shouldn't.

Freedom of expression includes the freedom not to speak. Forcing people to cast a ballot (even a blank one) is compelled civic participation in a way that no other liberal democracy applies to any other civic act. We don't compel jury service enthusiasm, we don't compel census completion with criminal sanction — oh, wait, some countries do that too, and it's also wrong. The principled liberal position is that voting should be one of the highest-turnout voluntary acts, which requires addressing the barriers to participation, not criminalising non-participation.

Belgium has had compulsory voting since 1893 and has consistently had among the most unstable coalition governments in Europe, extremely high rates of party fragmentation, and voters who report high rates of 'donkey voting' (voting for whoever is first on the ballot). The mandatory system has produced neither the representational quality nor the policy coherence its advocates promise. If anything, forcing unmotivated voters to participate may actually increase susceptibility to populist parties that offer simple emotional appeals over complex policy platforms.