Just looked at the paper, my prior was that I made a mistake… but I think the paper does actually argue that compulsory voting causes populism and voluntary voting reduces populism—the double negation makes it hard to interpret. See:
“Highlights • The abolition of compulsory voting in the Netherlands provides a unique quasi-experiment.
• The persistence of compulsory voting in Belgium also provides a most similar control case.
• Analyses of these data reveal voluntary voting benefits Dutch social democratic parties.
“We use a quasi-experimental framework to test the conventional wisdom that left-of-center parties benefit from higher turnout by analyzing the partisan effects of the abolition of compulsory voting in the Netherlands. Fixed effects, multilevel, and matching models of party family vote shares in the Netherlands before and after the reform–and in reference to a control group of Belgian party families–show consistent evidence the voting reform led to an increase in the vote share of Dutch social democratic parties and a decrease in the vote share won by minor and extreme parties.”
“We take advantage of the close similarity between the Netherlands and Belgium to measure vote shares for the Dutch parties in a quasi-natural experiment vis-à-vis a comparable and contemporaneous Belgian control group. Contrary to the conventional wisdom and a stream of the literature, we find the decrease in turnout in post-1970 Netherlands contributed to a significant boost in vote share for social democratic (on the order of 8.5 points) and liberal (on the order of 2.2 points) parties in the Netherlands. The increase in the vote share of liberal parties, however, does not appear to be causally related to the reform in voting. This increase in vote share is at the expense of minor and ideologically extreme parties.”
but the effect seems somewhat inconsistent: “Parties on the extreme ends of the spectrum exhibit different effects of the reform. Right wing parties lose vote share, but only when Belgian parties are included in the model. Dutch left wing parties also lose vote share, but the effect is nonsignificant when Belgian data is added to the model.”
Just looked at the paper, my prior was that I made a mistake… but I think the paper does actually argue that compulsory voting causes populism and voluntary voting reduces populism—the double negation makes it hard to interpret. See:
“Highlights
• The abolition of compulsory voting in the Netherlands provides a unique quasi-experiment.
• The persistence of compulsory voting in Belgium also provides a most similar control case.
• Analyses of these data reveal voluntary voting benefits Dutch social democratic parties.
“We use a quasi-experimental framework to test the conventional wisdom that left-of-center parties benefit from higher turnout by analyzing the partisan effects of the abolition of compulsory voting in the Netherlands. Fixed effects, multilevel, and matching models of party family vote shares in the Netherlands before and after the reform–and in reference to a control group of Belgian party families–show consistent evidence the voting reform led to an increase in the vote share of Dutch social democratic parties and a decrease in the vote share won by minor and extreme parties.”
“We take advantage of the close similarity between the Netherlands and Belgium to measure vote shares for the Dutch parties in a quasi-natural experiment vis-à-vis a comparable and contemporaneous Belgian control group. Contrary to the conventional wisdom and a stream of the literature, we find the decrease in turnout in post-1970 Netherlands contributed to a significant boost in vote share for social democratic (on the order of 8.5 points) and liberal (on the order of 2.2 points) parties in the Netherlands. The increase in the vote share of liberal parties, however, does not appear to be causally related to the reform in voting. This increase in vote share is at the expense of minor and ideologically extreme parties.”
but the effect seems somewhat inconsistent: “Parties on the extreme ends of the spectrum exhibit different effects of the reform. Right wing parties lose vote share, but only when Belgian parties are included in the model. Dutch left wing parties also lose vote share, but the effect is nonsignificant when Belgian data is added to the model.”