Predicting Electoral Abstention: Abolishing Compulsory Voting in Belgium

• In Event: Interventions and Innovations That Impact Turnout and Voting

Abstract

Belgium is one of the few liberal democracies with a general system of compulsory voting, with as a consequence a high turnout rate of more than 90 per cent. In the field of electoral studies, there is an ongoing debate about how to investigate the consequences of compulsory voting. In countries where compulsory voting is applied, this usually happens by using the counterfactual question on what voters would do if compulsory voting would be abolished, but the validity of this question has been questioned in numerous studies.

In this manuscript, we investigate a rather unique situation, where the May 2024 general elections in Belgium will still be held with a system of compulsory voting, while the October 2024 local elections will be conducted with compulsory voting in the South of the country, and without in the North of the country. We consider this as a unique case to investigate the validity of theoretical models with regard to voter turnout. More specifically, we use data from the first two waves of the Electoral Study in Belgium (April and June 2024) to forecast the likelihood that voters will turn out in October. The theoretical models in this regard will include mostly indicators like political interest, education level, age and political efficacy. The results of this forecast will be compared with the counterfactual question on what respondents would do without compulsory voting.

We consider it as important to present the results of this forecasting model already in September 2024 (at the APSA Annual Meeting), so that we make a publicly available forecasting well before the regional elections which will be pre-registered before the fall elections. This allows us to compare the results of our forecast with the actual results of the later waves of the Belgian Electoral Study, allowing us to observe how well our model performed. In this way, we can investigate not only the consequences of abolishing compulsory voting, but we can also assess the validity of the survey questions that are typically used to investigate the potential abolishment of compulsory voting.

Authors

• Dieter Stiers, KU Leuven

• Marc Hooghe, University Leuven