An Institutional Duty to Vote: Applying Role Morality in Representative Democracy

• Published date: 01 December 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917231178519
• Author: Kevin J. Elliott
• Date: 01 December 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917231178519

Political Theory

2023, Vol. 51(6) 897 –924

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/00905917231178519

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Article

An Institutional Duty

to Vote: Applying

Role Morality in

Representative

Democracy

Kevin J. Elliott1

Abstract

Is voting a duty of democratic citizenship? This article advances a new

argument for the existence of a duty to vote. It argues that every normative

account of electoral representation requires universal turnout to function in

line with its own internal normative logic. This generates a special obligation

for citizens to vote in electoral representative contexts as a function of the

role morality of democratic citizenship. Because voting uniquely authorizes

office holding in representative democracies, and because universal turnout

contributes powerfully to representation being fair, to be a good citizen

of such democracies requires one to vote. Whereas previous arguments

for a duty to vote have invoked basic moral principles like fairness or a

Samaritan duty of rescue, this account is based on citizens occupying a vital

functional role within electoral representative institutions. This institutional

duty solves the “specificity problem” of justifying a duty to vote better than

competing accounts and also immunizes the duty to objections that there is

no duty to vote when there are only bad choices and that there is a no duty

to vote but rather duty to vote well. By emphasizing the tight connection

between institutions and individual conduct, the role morality approach

used here supplies a less abstract and more realistic framework than much

1Murray State University, Murray, KY, USA

Corresponding Author:

Kevin J. Elliott, Yale University, 31 Hillhouse Avenue, New Haven, CT 06511, USA.

Email: k.elliott@yale.edu

1178519PTXXXX10.1177/00905917231178519Political TheoryElliott

research-article2023

898 Political Theory 51(6)

previous research on the ethics of democratic citizenship and brings the

debate closer to constitutive features of democratic politics.

Keywords

democratic theory, ethics of voting, duty to vote, role morality, special

obligation, compulsory voting

Introduction

Is voting a duty of democratic citizenship? If you ask them, democratic citi-

zens tend to think so. Ninety percent of Americans have agreed that voting

has been a duty as far back as we have had polling, for more than half a cen-

tury (Elliott 2017, 660–62). But what might be the basis of such a duty?

There has been much recent discussion of this enduring question. Some

scholars have shared the popular intuition that voting is a duty and have

sought to develop arguments explaining it (Maring 2016; Maskivker 2019;

Umbers 2020). Others have gone the other way, seeking to show that voting

isn’t a duty, and even that some citizens have a duty not to vote (Brennan

2014; Freiman 2021; Volacu 2020).

In this article, I argue that there is an individual duty to vote grounded in

the institutional role of voters in electoral representative democracies. I show

that fair electoral representation on virtually any account requires universal

and unbiased turnout to function in line with the institutional logic underlying

representation. This logic generates a duty to vote via role morality because

fulfilling the official function of a democratic citizen within representative

institutions requires one to vote. I call the resulting duty an institutional duty

to vote because it is directly based on the internal normative logic of repre-

sentative institutions rather than any external moral duty.

This account seeks to bring the debate on the duty to vote closer to the

constitutive realities of democratic politics, particularly the role of institu-

tions in mediating individual actions and the collective nature of political

responsibility, and to highlight the unique contribution of voting to functional

representative democracies. We see this in the account’s original use of role

morality to link individual duty and institutions (rather than moral duties) and

its emphasis on the excellence of the political system rather than the

individual (in contrast to virtue ethics). The institutional duty to vote also has

the advantage that it can definitively answer the specificity problem, or why

we must specifically vote rather than contribute to the public some other way.

This approach supplies an enriched and more realistic framework for future