As voting rates have declined in several democracies, concern about an exacerbation of inequality in electoral participation has been voiced in certain quarters. Compulsory voting (CV) has often been suggested as a solution to both low and unequal turnout.
Whereas the empirical literature has demonstrated that mandatory voting has a strong positive impact on turnout levels, the jury is still out as to whether it reduces biases in electoral participation. I herein address this question by means of a regression discontinuity design (RDD) that takes advantage of a feature of CV laws that is present in some countries: the fact that poll attendance is optional for citizens above a certain age.
In this paper I specifically seek to examine the impact of mandatory voting on gender inequality in electoral participation. To this end, I have implemented a RDD on an original dataset that contains individual-level information from two Latin American countries.
