Another instance I recently noticed, and reacted moderately strongly against, was this post and its comments, where there is the implicit assumption that voting (for political candidates) is voluntary, and the discussion makes no consideration of compulsory voting.
The main reason I reacted against it was that the assumption was implicit, (mainly since nature of the discussion is not relevant to systems with compulsory voting).
Oh, I had no idea that it was that low. I’d though most of europe used compulsory voting.
Although, according to the wikipedia article, there are an additional 21 countries that have compulsory voting but don’t enforce it. Which suggests that there are at least 2 billion people who live in a system with some sort of compulsory voting, and a bit under 400 million have enforced compulsory voting (I checked the populations of some of the countries).
(For what it’s worth, I’m in Australia (with compulsory voting), so that would have contributed to my reaction.)
And zero countries have compulsory voter research. If you take the question “what’s my rational incentive to spend an hour in line at the poll after spending several hours sieving through ads news and spin to find facts about candidates”, and you remove the “hour in line” part, the decision problem is pretty similar at the personal level.
At the social level, “what is the impact of encouraging more votes from people who won’t voluntarily spend time on voting” is an interesting question, but I don’t think that’s the discussion the linked post was trying to have.
Another instance I recently noticed, and reacted moderately strongly against, was this post and its comments, where there is the implicit assumption that voting (for political candidates) is voluntary, and the discussion makes no consideration of compulsory voting.
The main reason I reacted against it was that the assumption was implicit, (mainly since nature of the discussion is not relevant to systems with compulsory voting).
But only 12 countries have enforced compulsory voting, out of ~150 democratic countries.
Oh, I had no idea that it was that low. I’d though most of europe used compulsory voting.
Although, according to the wikipedia article, there are an additional 21 countries that have compulsory voting but don’t enforce it. Which suggests that there are at least 2 billion people who live in a system with some sort of compulsory voting, and a bit under 400 million have enforced compulsory voting (I checked the populations of some of the countries).
(For what it’s worth, I’m in Australia (with compulsory voting), so that would have contributed to my reaction.)
And zero countries have compulsory voter research. If you take the question “what’s my rational incentive to spend an hour in line at the poll after spending several hours sieving through ads news and spin to find facts about candidates”, and you remove the “hour in line” part, the decision problem is pretty similar at the personal level.
At the social level, “what is the impact of encouraging more votes from people who won’t voluntarily spend time on voting” is an interesting question, but I don’t think that’s the discussion the linked post was trying to have.