Compulsory Voting and Parties' Vote-Seeking Strategies

I advance a theory about how compulsory voting affects the behavior of political parties. The theory suggests that parties will pivot toward programmatic vote-seeking strategies and away from clientelistic tactics, such as vote buying, where voting is compulsory. I test my expectations in three separate studies, using several data sources and empirical approaches. In Study 1, cross-national analyses show that parties behave more programmatically under compulsory voting and that vote buying is less common where voting is mandatory. In Study 2, synthetic control and difference-in-differences analyses show that a switch to compulsory voting in Thailand produced an increase in programmatic vote seeking. In Study 3, a list experiment conducted in tandem with a natural experiment shows that compulsory voting leads parties to rely less on vote-buying tactics in Argentina. I conclude by discussing the implications of these findings, which together are broadly supportive of my theoretical expectations.