Andreea Daniela | University of Bucharest (original) (raw)

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Papers by Andreea Daniela

This study assesses the effectiveness of compulsory voting in achieving better representation of ... more This study assesses the effectiveness of compulsory voting in achieving better representation of the preferences of all social groups. I focus my analysis on the 2009 Romanian presidential elections. To begin with, I compare voters and non-voters in terms of socio-demographic characteristics and democratic attitudes, in order to assess whether or not there are significant differences between the groups and thus whether or not voters are a representative sample of the electorate. I find that there are indeed socio-demographic differences between voters and nonvoters. In addition, voters are more interested and engaged in politics. On the contrary, the differences in democratic attitudes are not significant and therefore I conclude that, in this respect, voters are representative of the entire electorate. However, this can also be interpreted by arguing that, unlike the beliefs of some, bringing non-voters to the ballots would not cause threats to democracy. Next, since the main effect of compulsory voting is increased turnout, I compute a predictive model of the non-voters' candidate preferences and simulate the election outcome with full turnout. In the first round, although the voters' candidate ordering is different from the non-voters', the simulated outcome of the election does not differ significantly. In the second round, the findings are biased by the inaccuracy of the data in predicting the actual election outcome and thus, although the simulated outcome is significantly different from the actual election outcome, I refrain from interpreting the results as an argument in favor of the existence of turnout effect. I conclude that, since non-voters have different preferences than voters, if full representation of preferences is a goal, compulsory voting could be a viable solution.

This study assesses the effectiveness of compulsory voting in achieving better representation of ... more This study assesses the effectiveness of compulsory voting in achieving better representation of the preferences of all social groups. I focus my analysis on the 2009 Romanian presidential elections. To begin with, I compare voters and non-voters in terms of socio-demographic characteristics and democratic attitudes, in order to assess whether or not there are significant differences between the groups and thus whether or not voters are a representative sample of the electorate. I find that there are indeed socio-demographic differences between voters and nonvoters. In addition, voters are more interested and engaged in politics. On the contrary, the differences in democratic attitudes are not significant and therefore I conclude that, in this respect, voters are representative of the entire electorate. However, this can also be interpreted by arguing that, unlike the beliefs of some, bringing non-voters to the ballots would not cause threats to democracy. Next, since the main effect of compulsory voting is increased turnout, I compute a predictive model of the non-voters' candidate preferences and simulate the election outcome with full turnout. In the first round, although the voters' candidate ordering is different from the non-voters', the simulated outcome of the election does not differ significantly. In the second round, the findings are biased by the inaccuracy of the data in predicting the actual election outcome and thus, although the simulated outcome is significantly different from the actual election outcome, I refrain from interpreting the results as an argument in favor of the existence of turnout effect. I conclude that, since non-voters have different preferences than voters, if full representation of preferences is a goal, compulsory voting could be a viable solution.