AMHERST, N.Y. — As the 2024 election cycle continues to ramp up across the country, we often hear about a rise in political polarization — the idea that political views from one side to another are growing further apart and becoming more extreme.

But a political philosopher at the University at Buffalo has published a paper that says making voting in elections mandatory, not just a right, could actually help decrease extreme polarization.  

"I’ve always been interested in democracy and the way we should organize democratic elections," said Alexandra Oprea, a political philosopher at the University at Buffalo. 

Showing up at a polling place and casting a ballot has been a long-held right in the United States of America. The first U.S. election laws date back to Article 1 of the Constitution, with several amendments over the years to expand and affirm those rights. But in some places throughout the world voting is compulsory — or mandatory.

Oprea has made a career of studying how elections work.

"I’ve always wondered what the best way is to design these electoral systems," Oprea said. 

Born in Romania during the rise of democracy there in the late 1980s, she recently co-wrote a paper that was published in the American Political Science Review looking at extreme political polarization and how compulsory voting, making it mandatory for citizens to vote, could affect the climate of political discourse and strategy in the United States.

"One of the reasons parties end up polarizing in this way is they’re trying to cater to more extreme members of their own party and these members can threaten not to turnout or not to cast a ballot unless the party moves towards their own political views," Oprea said. 

There are more than two dozen countries around the world that have experimented with some form of required voting. Oprea says studies show mandatory voting increased turnout by an average of 14.5 to 18.5 percentage points. In Australia for example, she says studies estimate voter turnout went up by 30%.

"The Australian experience has been widely touted as one of the very successful democracies," she said. "They have very high turnout. They tend to have a very active and rich political culture, of political debate, and unlike democracies such as the U.S., they don’t have a big problem of political polarization."

A 2022 Pew Research Center study found the United States ranked 31st out of 50 developed countries in voter turnout in recent national elections. Oprea and her co-authors believe mandatory voting would raise that number. She says one of the reasons voters decide not to vote is a feeling of alienation — that their views are too far away from the extreme left or right.

"So in this case the parties will naturally be drawn closer to the middle of the political spectrum. They’re going to fight over winning the median voter in a way that we think would have quite a few positive consequences for democracy as a whole," Oprea said. 

Looking at the Australian system, Oprea found there is much less gridlock.

"Parties can agree across the aisle to pass more legislation because they don’t see the other side as being so different and so threatening," she said. 

One concern she was that compulsory voting could actually bring on new voters who are also at the extremes of the political spectrum. In some countries with mandatory voting, it’s viewed as an expectation and not heavily enforced, while others have punishments like fines for not showing up to the polls.

While any major national shift in our election system is unlikely right now, Oprea said there are states where municipalities can design their own systems.

"And I believe that the time has come for some experiments like this to make it clearer what kinds of advantages and disadvantages might exist in a system with compulsory voting," she said.