Should voting be mandatory?

9.7.2014 Työpapereita Lauro Carnicelli

Abstract

This paper conjectures if it’s worth for a country to have a mandatory voting scheme. For that purpose, an overlapping generations model, with budget constrained agents, idiosyncratic shocks and probabilistic voting is used to compare two economies with elective and obligatory voting set ups and see which delivers the biggest welfare. Results show that a)the introduction of mandatory voting increases welfare b)there is an ambiguous effect of inequality c)there is evidence that an increase in voting turnout can enhance welfare. Furthermore, the model shows the importance of adding the voting turnout as a weight in the planners’ problem.