Compulsory Voting Boosts Men’s Turnout More Than Women’s

Equal turnout supports equal representation, but mandatory voting may shift who shows up.

📊 Administrative turnout records from Brazil and cross-country comparisons

Uses administrative data from elections within Brazil and from multiple countries to compare turnout under compulsory and voluntary systems. Also compares official turnout records with reported turnout from surveys to detect discrepancies in self-reported participation.

🧭 Theory: External incentives vs intrinsic motivation

Argues that men respond more to external incentives (such as legal compulsion), while women are relatively more intrinsically motivated to vote. This differential responsiveness predicts that introducing or enforcing compulsory voting will raise men’s turnout by more than women’s.

🔍 Key findings

• Compulsory voting increases men’s turnout more than women’s, both in Brazilian administrative records and in cross-country administrative comparisons.
• Because of social desirability bias, nonvoting women are particularly likely to report having voted when voting is mandatory.
• Comparisons of official and reported turnout show that compulsory voting increases women’s overreporting of turnout relative to men’s, meaning survey measures can overstate women’s compliance with compulsory rules.

⚖️ Why it matters

By increasing men’s relative turnout, compulsory voting can introduce or accentuate representational disparities in favor of men. Reliance on survey data alone can obscure this effect because women’s higher tendency to overreport participation under mandatory rules masks the true gendered turnout gap.