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Proportional representation is a system in which seats in an elected body are awarded in proportion to the overall preferences of the electoral.
Proportional representation is a system in which seats in an elected body are awarded in proportion to the overall preferences of the electoral.
One of the main choices in designing a democracy is whether to elect representatives according to the preferences of most voters in a particular area or in proportion to the overall preferences of citizens in the polity.
Proportional representation is a popular and diverse set of ways to across the world. Most countries use some form of proportional representation to entrench the duty to vote in law. Known also as "compulsory voting," mandatory voting is a legal mechanism by which enfranchised citizens are required to vote in some or all elections, usually under threat of a penalty like a fine or disenfranchisement in future elections.
Candidate flyer for the 1949 Victoria (Australia) state by-election in the electorate of Prahran reminding voters that voting is mandatory (National Library of Australia).
Contents
Contents
Proportional Represenation Around the World
Proportional Represenation Around the World
More than 20 countries around the world currently use some form of mandatory voting, including Australia, Brazil, Mexico, and Thailand.1
Many other places have mandated voting at some points in their history, including some American colonies and U.S. states.
Variations on the Proportional Theme
Variations on the Proportional Theme
Penalties for not voting are usually minor. Indeed, in four countries (Costa Rica, Greece, Honduras, and Mexico), the laws provide no penalties at all for not voting.
Among the countries that do outline penalties for not voting, the most common kind is a monetary fine. The law in 17 countries imposes a fine for not voting. Usually, the fines are small. For example, in Australia, the fine for not voting in AU$20 (~US$16).
In six countries, including Chile, Egypt, and Luxembourg, not voting may result in imprisonment, usually folling the failure to pay one or multiple fines for not voting. Note, however, it is very rare for anyone to be imprisoned for not voting outside of North Korea. North Korea is the only country where imprisonment is the standard penalty the law imposes on nonvoters. In Australia, nonvoters can be imprisoned only for for failing to pay their fines for not voting. As an Australian official once explained to the Washington Post, non-voters are not imprisoned for failing to vote; they may be imprisoned for failing to pay their fine for failing to vote. "It may seem a fine distinction, but people do not get sentenced to jail for not voting."
In 8 countries, including Belgium, Singapore, and Thailand, nonvoters may lose their ability to vote (be “disenfranchised”) in future elections.
A broad range of other penalties are possible, though rare. For example, in Brazil, failure to vote and pay fines for not voting in multiple elections may result in a nonvoter being prevented from obtaining a passport, a government job, and/or enrolling in public education.
Mixed Systems -
Mixed Systems -
In most countries with mandatory voting, little or no effort is made to enforce mandatory voting laws. The data are difficult to find, but our research suggests only seven countries, including Australia, Nauru, and North Korea, strictly enforce their mandatory voting law. In the remaining countries, enforcement is weak or nonexistent.
One of the reasons for the weak enforcement of mandatory voting is the sheer volume of penalties that would be issued. For example, in response to low turnout in the 2020 election, Egyptian authorities threatened to prosecute nonvoters for their violation of the law. This would have involved sending expiation notices to 54 million nonvoters, a behemoth administrative task. It appears the Egyptian authorities did not go through with their threat.
Even in those countries with the will and administrative capacity to strictly enforce mandatory voting, the secret ballot ensures that mandatory voting is impossible to fully enforce (since those determined not to vote can always cast a blank or spoiled ballot). Indeed, when states enforce mandatory voting they almost always see an much higher level of invalid votes (blank or spoiled ballots).
Exemptions
Exemptions
Most countries with mandatory voting carve our large exemptions to the rule. Age is a common ground for exemption, with those over 65 or 70 commonly excluded from the requirement to vote. Citizens in hospital, travelling, or illiterate are also commonly exempted, as are people with disabilities. In many countries, there is a long list of acceptable excuses for not voting.
Why Use Proportional Representation?
Why Use Proportional Representation?
Arguments for Mandatory Voting
Arguments for Mandatory Voting
Arguments advanced for mandatory voting include the idea that voting is a civic duty, that high turnout makes politics more equal, and that it produces better election results. These arguments generally fall into two categories: the normative (based on ideas about the way the the world should be) and the instrumentalist, centering on perceived beneficial consequences of mandatory voting.
(Expand for more)
Arguments for mandatory voting
Arguments for mandatory voting
It’s a civic duty:
Voting is not only a right, it is a duty, like jury duty. To fail to vote is a dereliction of civic duty that should be punished unless the nonvoter has a legitimate excuse for their conduct.
It makes politics more equal:
When every eligible person votes, eligible citizens achieve an equal say and have an equal stake in politics and government.
It reduces inequities in turnout and makes politics and government more representative:
Mandatory voting is the most effective way to increase voter turnout. Higher voter turnout means:
Voters are more representative of the people.
In turn, politicians that win higher turnout elections are more representative of the people.
It makes politics and government less polarized and more moderate:
When everyone is compelled to turnout to vote, politicians must win the votes of a broad range of voters, including moderates, to win.
High turnout elections mean that candidates cannot win by mobilizing only the most interested, engaged, and often extreme (in their ideology) citizens.
It acknowledges the centrality of elections to modern democracies:
Elections have a unique and valuable role in modern democracies as "special occasions for universal participation" (Chapman, 2019). Mandatory voting ensures that the primary vehicle for democratic decision making includes the maximum number of people.
It ensures elections are a census of public opinion:
Elections are intended primarily to determine the "will of the people." Mandatory voting ensures that the will of the people can be accurately ascertained.
It boosts legitimacy and provides leaders a strong mandate.
By involving more citizens in official decision-making processes, mandatory voting increases democratic legitimacy and provides those elected with a powerful mandate to implement their platform.
Excerpt of an argument in favor of mandatory voting in Australia in the 1890s (P.D. Phillip (1895) On a Law for Compulsory Voting)
"No non- voter is a good citizen. At most he is merely not a bad citizen.
If he does not vote today (when his country needs him) he should not be permitted to vote tomorrow (when he may have an axe to grind)."
Arguments Against Mandatory Voting
Arguments Against Mandatory Voting
Arguments against mandatory voting center on the normative arguments (opposition to state coercion), the instrumentalist (centering on perceived negagtive consequences of mandatory voting), and the empirical (the lack of evidence for many of the claims about the positive effects of mandatory voting).
(Expand for more)
Arguments against mandatory voting
Arguments against mandatory voting
It goes beyond the proper role of the state:
The state should not coerce citizens into performing specific acts unless those acts prevent harm to others. No clear harm is prevented by forcing a particular individual to vote. Indeed forcing a citizen to participate in a political system they object to or find irrelevant may itself cause harm (a violation of personal autonomy).
It violates the right to vote:
Like all rights, the right to vote inherently includes the right to refrain. If a right is transformed into a legal duty, it ceases to be a right and becomes a tool of state control.
It violates freedom of speech:
Silence is a powerful form of speech. Abstaining from an election can be a deliberate, high-impact, and meaningful political statement. Mandatory voting strips the citizen of this specific "none of the above" signal, forcing them to participate in a "charade of consent."
It mischaracterizes elections:
Elections are intended to be contests of engagement, fought between candidates competing to persuade citizens they are worth voting for. Mandatory voting misconstrues elections as passive censuses of latent public opinion, in which campaign should not matter.
It is impossible to enforce:
The state cannot force an individual to vote without violating the secrecy of the ballot. A citizen compelled to the polls may always cast a blank or deliberately spoiled ballot. This means mandatory voting laws amount to laws for compulsory attendance at a specific place on a specific date.
It doesn't get much closer to revealing the true will of the people:
The votes of voters who turnout only because they are compelled are more likely to be uninformed, haphazard, or deliberately erroneous than voluntary voters. Forcing people to vote introduces "noise" into election results, increasing the number of votes made by random selection, superficial biases, or the most effective (and potentially misleading) last-minute advertising.
It does not live up to the hype:
Empirical studies provide little evidence that mandatory voting makes politics and government significantly more representative or less polarized. Mandatory voting results in both higher turnout. But it also results in much greater numbers of invalid votes, which are closely associated with socio-economic disadvantage.
It disempowers minorities:
Mandatory voting transforms elections from contests of mobilization to contests to persuade the least interested. This disempowers energized and engaged minorities of all types (including oppressed minorities seeking to challenge the status quo) and places power in the hands of the least politically informed and interested.
It decreases legitimacy:
Since forced consent isn't true consent, leaders elected under mandatory voting may claim a broad mandate, but that mandate is artificially inflated by people who may not actually support their platform.
It encourages complacency:
When turnout is guaranteed by law, citizens lose a powerful warning sign about their country's democratic performance. Countless Americans have been mobilized into civic action in response to concerns about low voter turnout.
Effect of Proportional Representation
Effect of Proportional Representation
What we know
What we know
A little.
Academic studies show mandatory voting increases voter turnout rates, especially when accompanied with strict enforcement (Kostelka et al, 2024). The turnout effect (with strict enforcement) can be as high as 24 percentage points (Fowler, 2013; Hoffman et al, 2017)
Closely related to its turnout effect, mandatory voting increases the number of invalid votes cast (Kouba and Mysicka, 2019; Gonzales et al, 2022; Gaebler et a1, 2020).
Those who turn out to vote are more representative of the eligible population under mandatory voting (Dassonneville et al, 2017). However, those who cast valid votes are less so, as invalid voting is correlated with lower socioeconomic status (Kouba and Mysicka, 2019).
What we don't know
What we don't know
A lot.
We do not know if mandatory voting makes politicians more representative of their constituents, largely because few have studied the question (Singh, 2024).
Similarly, we do not know whether mandatory voting encourages moderation of candidates. One study suggested that large parties moderate their policies under mandatory voting, but minor parties did not (Singh, 2021).
The connection between mandatory voting and political engagement of citizens is weak, at best. Some studies (Bruce and Lima, 2019; Shineman, 2018) have found that citizens are more informed if they are compelled to vote; but many others find no such relationship (de Leon and Rizzi, 2014; Gaebler et a1, 2020; León, 2017; Loewen et al, 2008, Singh, 2022).
We do not yet know the effect of mandatory voting on political attitudes, though there is some evidence to suggest that is can increase dissatisfaction with democracy (Singh, 2018).
Proportional Representation in the United States
Proportional Representation in the United States
Australia has over a century of experience with strictly enforced mandatory voting, with a small fine penalty that can escalate to imprisonment if the fine is not paid. In a typical election, 86% to 89% of eligible Australians turn out to vote, and about 1 in 20 voters cast a invalid vote (although at times closet to 1 in 10 voters cast an invalid vote).
In Australia, the idea of making voting mandatory dates as far back as the 1860s, when the Solicitor-General of (the colony of) Tasmania proposed a scheme for “compulsory” voting. In the following decades, mandatory voting was visited and revisited around the country. Mandatory voting was first legislated in Australia in 1914 by Digby Denham’s conservative government for the state of Queensland's elections. It spread to federal elections (where registering to vote had been made mandatory in 1911) in 1924. Australian states gradually adopted mandatory voting for their elections with South Australia being the last of the states to do so in 1941.
Cartoon from 1912 referencing mandatory voter registration, which had been introduced in Australia the year before.
Note: This turnout, while high, does not translate to 95% of age or citizen eligible voters (the measures commonly used to measure American turnout). Instead, Australian turnout is probably closer to 85% - 90% of the citizen eligible population (and significantly less of the age eligible population). See our Voter Turnout 101 for more information.
After the introduction of mandatory voting, voter turnout increased immediately. Average voter turnout in the nine Australian federal elections before mandatory voting was 64% of registered voters. In the 100 years since the introduction of mandatory voting, turnout has been more consistent, averaging 95% of registered voters, though it has trended down in recent years (averaging less than 92% since 2010).
Excerpt from the cover of the Australian government's official guide to the 2025 federal election with "voting is compulsory" emblazoned on the front.
For example, after a West Australian election in 2023, more than 200,000 registered voters who did not vote were sent a notice asking them to explain why they didn't vote, over 50,000 paid a fine for not voting, and 92 were taken to court after refusing to pay the fine.
Mandatory voting, called "compulsory voting" in Australia, is uncontroversial there.
Enforcement is serious business. The national election commission (which runs all federal elections and coordinates the creation of a federal voter registration list), actively promotes compulsory voting and issues notices demanding an explanation to all nonvoters on the voter list. So too do the state election commissions that run state and local elections.
In their support for compulsory voting, Australian courts have expressed a rather dystopian view of democracy, in which forcing individuals to choose among candidates offensive to them or when they have no sincere preference is a normal and legitimate part of democracy. As Graeme Orr explains, the highest court in Australia has equated voting as an act like choosing the lesser evil "akin to choosing the manner of one’s death."
South Australia's mandatory voting law, passed in 1942, is the only one in Australia that specifically allows for casting a blank ballot.
An article in the Economist on the imprisonment of Albert Langer for not voting in 1996 (The Economist March 9, 1996 p. 76).
History in the United States
History in the United States
Fined 100lbs of tobacco? Mandatory Voting in Colonial America
Fined 100lbs of tobacco? Mandatory Voting in Colonial America
Most of the world's early experience with mandatory voting comes from colonial North America — experience that spans well over a century. In his volume History of Elections in the American Colonies, Cortland Bishop showed that compulsory voting experiments were in place in the Plymouth colony as early as 1636 and the statute book records a 3 shilling fine on any “delinquent” who did not attend a poll. From 1646, non-voting freemen in the plantation colony of Virginia were fined 100 pounds of tobacco (raised to 200 pounds in 1662). Delaware and Maryland also compelled eligible voters to vote in elections at various points during their colonial histories. After the Revolution, non-voting was a fineable offence under Georgia’s Constitution of 1777. Eventually mandatory voting laws in colonial America were repealed or simply ignored (John and DeBats, 2014).
The Progressive Era
The Progressive Era
In the United States, agitation to make voting mandatory resurged, beginning in the 1880s in Massachusetts and ending around 1920. Academics wrote articles debating the merits of mandatory voting in the 1890s and continued to do so until the end of the First World War; newspaper editorials in diverse states argued for the consideration of mandatory voting; and many activists pressured for or introduced mandatory voting bills and constitutional amendments to permit compulsion in voting.
In the 1910s, a number of high-ranking officials publicly favored mandatory voting, including members of President Woodrow Wilson’s Cabinet. Enthusiasm for compulsion was high in this period, one also characterized, and significantly so, by great concern over the suffrage and the use of the vote by immigrant groups in the thrall of political party machines. An editorial in the Pierre Capital Journal of South Dakota predicted in 1916 that “[i]n our estimation the next great issue in the United States [after female suffrage] will be compulsory suffrage”.
This prediction, of course, proved to be wrong. Nonetheless, mandatory voting laws were introduced into the legislatures of no fewer than six states and proposed or discussed in many more. By 1903 mandatory voting bills in the Pennsylvania legislature were so commonplace as to cause the Philadelphia Inquirer to dismiss that year’s iteration as“[o]ne of those bills that makes their appearance at every session”.
Kansas City, Missouri, and Mr Whipple
Kansas City, Missouri, and Mr Whipple
Kansas City, Missouri revised its city charter in 1889 and included a rather novel provision for mandatory voting that would waive a poll-tax for those who voted:
Every male person over the age of twenty-one years who shall be a resident of Kansas City shall be assessed for each year in which a general election is held a poll tax of two dollars and fifty cents, which shall be collected and paid in the same manner as any other personal tax: provided, however, that if the person so assessed shall vote at the general city election held in the year for which such tax is levied, and shall receive a certificate from the recorder of voters that he has voted at such election, or shall otherwise establish in such manner as may be provided by ordinance that he has so voted, such certificate or proof shall operate to extinguish such tax for such year […] All moneys collected under this section shall be used for sanitary purposes.
This compulsory voting experiment — which imposed a tax on nonvoters — was enforced for a decade, from 1889 to 1898, and ended when one non-voter, B.T Whipple, appealed the matter to the Missouri Supreme Court. The Court held that the mandatory voting provision was contrary to the State Constitution because the government could not compel the people to perform their sovereign duty (to vote).
Excerpt of a report on mandatory voting in Kansas City (San Francisco Call, April 24, 1892, p. 4).
Coverage of the ballot measures in Oregon in 1920, including the mandatory voting measure (Oregon Voter, June 12, 1920, p.4).
Constitutional Amendments
Constitutional Amendments
After the Missouri Supreme Court ruled, the arena for mandatory voting advocacy moved to constitutional amendments — with fervor — to make compulsion legally possible. These constitutional amendment processes were by constitutional convention or referendum and engaged the citizenry directly in compulsory voting debates. At least four constitutional amendments explicitly enabling legislatures to pass laws requiring all eligible citizens to vote were proposed after 1898; two of those amendments succeeded. In 1898, North Dakota voters inserted a provision enabling their state legislature to introduce compulsory voting into their State Constitution and the sixty-first amendment of the Massachusetts Constitution still reads: “The general court [the state legislature] shall have authority to provide for compulsory voting at elections, but the right of secret voting shall be preserved”. In neither of these two states did the legislature actually legislate for mandatory voting. In Oregon, a referendum was held on compulsory voting in November 1920; almost 200,000 Oregonians voted, two-thirds of whom opposed the measure. Mandatory voting drifted off the American political agenda soon thereafter, never to seriously return. Occasionally reformers concerned about low voter turnout raise it as an idea; but it rarely gains traction.
For more see: John and DeBats (2014).
Reading List
Reading List
In progress
Protect Democracy
https://protectdemocracy.org/work/proportional-representation-explained/
Notes
Notes
Figuring out which countries have used compulsory voting ( as well as whether they enforce it) is difficult. Do you know something we don't? Please send any corrections or additions to info@doctorsofdemocracy.org.
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