Compulsory or Uninformed? How Knowledge of Compulsory Voting Rules Affects Turnout

High electoral turnout in countries with compulsory voting systems is often attributed to citizens' desire to avoid the legal consequences for abstention. However, turnout is equally high in compulsory voting contexts where penalties are absent or unenforced, which challenges this notion. An alternative perspective suggests that citizens’ lack of knowledge about enforcement drives turnout, but little is known about the causal effect of such knowledge. This study examines whether knowledge of compulsory voting rules and their (lack of) enforcement influences turnout likelihood. To do so, we focus on Belgium, a country with a long history of compulsory voting – including high levels of turnout – but without enforcement of the legal consequences for abstention. We conduct a vignette survey experiment to analyse how factual information about compulsory voting, potential penalties for abstention, and the absence of enforcement of these penalties influences citizens’ likelihood of voting in future elections. We find that knowledge of the rules only has limited effects: whereas information about the penalty slightly increases turnout intention, information about its non-enforcement makes respondents just as likely to turn out as respondents in the control condition without any information. These findings suggest that the effects of compulsory voting are largely unrelated to the legal consequences of abstention.