How do you design an election that people actually turn up to?
Brazil shows what changing the friction does. Turnout there runs close to eighty per cent. Voting is compulsory, which matters, but the design goes further: polling stations sit in schools and community centres within walking distance, election day is treated as a social occasion with music and family participation, and there is a cultural norm that voting is something people do together. The friction has been removed and the threshold rebuilt as a social invitation. The same civic act, designed differently, produces a completely different turnout.
The opinion that never reaches the ballot
The conventional response to low turnout is to inform and exhort. Run awareness campaigns about why voting matters. Simplify the electoral system. Provide more information about the candidates. The logic assumes people do not vote because they are not convinced it matters or do not understand the choice, and that persuasion and information will fix it.
But democracies with low turnout are rarely places where people have no opinions; they are places where the friction of acting on those opinions exceeds the motivation in the moment. The polling station is far. The day is inconvenient. The process is complex or unfamiliar. Each of these is a small barrier, and on a busy day, small barriers are enough to turn a genuine intention to vote into a quiet failure to get there. The awareness campaign does nothing about this, because the problem was never a lack of conviction; it was the gap between conviction and action that the environment makes too wide to cross. People who fully intend to vote simply do not, defeated by friction the campaign never addresses.
Brazil changed the friction and the social framing rather than the messaging. By placing polling stations within walking distance, in familiar places like schools, and by making election day a pleasant, social, communal occasion, it shrank the gap between intention and action to almost nothing, and wrapped the act in a positive social norm. Voting is compulsory, which sets the floor, but the design does the rest: it is easy, it is local, it is something done together with music and family. The latent willingness to vote, present in most people, is converted into actual turnout, not by persuading anyone harder, but by removing the friction and adding the social pull.
Why this is design, not exhortation
You could read Brazil's high turnout as simply the effect of compulsory voting. But compulsion alone does not explain it, and the behavioural lesson is in the design, which is the mechanism.
The Brazilian system does not produce turnout mainly by motivating people to value democracy. The civic-pride campaign is not what gets people there. The turnout comes from the environment removing the friction and adding a social occasion: voting is easy, local, communal, so the latent intention becomes action. People turn up not because they were inspired, but because the environment made turning up easy and socially rewarding. The turnout is not exhorted. It is produced by low friction and a positive norm.
That is the difference between design and motivation, and with civic behaviour it is decisive. Motivation tries to make people care more about voting, when most already care enough; the gap is in acting. Design removes the friction between caring and acting, and adds a social pull, so the existing willingness converts into turnout. You cannot reliably motivate people across a threshold the environment has made too high. You can lower the threshold and add the social invitation, and let the latent willingness become a vote.
The empty ballot box was never only about people not caring. It was about an environment that made acting on the caring harder than the caring could overcome. At SUE, the Influence Framework and SWAC are the methods we teach in the Behavioural Design Fundamentals Course to systematically analyse how institutional design builds or erodes trust and where the friction sits between civic intention and civic action.
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The principle: friction reduction in civic behaviour
The research underneath this is well established, and naming it turns Brazil's local polling stations into a usable principle.[1]
Research on friction reduction in civic behaviour finds that turnout rises with every fraction of friction removed. The motivation to vote is, for most people, latently present; whether it converts into actual voting depends heavily on the environment. Reduce the distance to the polling station, simplify the act, make the day convenient, and turnout climbs, not because people suddenly care more, but because the existing willingness now meets a path it can actually travel. Small changes in friction produce changes in behaviour out of proportion to their size, because they sit precisely at the gap between intention and action where so much civic behaviour is won or lost.
This is why Brazil's design produces high turnout where exhortation produces little. The exhortation targets motivation, which is mostly not the binding constraint; the friction targets the actual gap between intention and action. By making voting low-friction and socially inviting, Brazil converts the latent willingness that already exists into turnout, which is exactly what the research identifies as the effective lever. The willingness was always there. The environment decided whether it became a vote.
The low turnout was never only about civic apathy. It was about friction that stopped latent willingness from ever reaching the ballot.
The general lesson here is one of the most underrated in all of behaviour change, and it is worth stating bluntly: we systematically overestimate the role of motivation and underestimate the role of friction. When people do not do something we wish they would, our instinct is to assume they do not care enough, and to try to make them care more. But far more often the caring is already there and the friction is quietly winning, one small obstacle at a time, in the gap between wanting and doing. The reason this matters is practical. Raising motivation is hard, slow and often impossible; removing friction is frequently cheap and fast. Brazil's polling stations in schools are not an inspiring message about democracy; they are a removed obstacle. And the removed obstacle did what the message could not.
Learn to apply this yourself
What makes friction reduction so powerful in civic behaviour is that it works on the gap between intention and action rather than on motivation itself: most people already want to act, and removing the environmental obstacles is what converts that latent willingness into behaviour. In the Behavioural Design Fundamentals Course, you learn to use the Influence Framework and SWAC to map exactly where that gap sits in any situation and redesign the conditions so the desired behaviour becomes the path of least resistance.
View the Behavioural Design Fundamentals CourseWhat you can design this week
You do not need to run an electoral system to apply this. The principle, that friction reduction converts latent willingness into action, works wherever people want to do something but do not.
Reduce friction, do not raise motivation. When people who want to act do not, the barrier is usually friction, not insufficient caring. Map the steps between intention and action and remove them, rather than trying to make people care more.
Bring the action to where people are. Brazil places voting within walking distance, in familiar places. Reducing the distance, literal or figurative, between people and the action you want shrinks the gap that defeats intention.
Add a positive social frame. Brazil makes election day communal and pleasant. Wrapping a desired behaviour in a positive social occasion adds a pull that pure obligation lacks, turning a chore into something people do together.
Target the gap between intention and action. This is the deeper shift. Most effort goes into building intention, which often already exists. The decisive move is to engineer the path from intention to action, because that gap, not a lack of willingness, is usually where the behaviour is lost.
The thread is the one that runs through everything we do at SUE. You rarely produce action by making people care more. You produce it by removing the friction between their existing willingness and the act. Brazil did not run a bigger campaign about the importance of voting. It made voting easy and communal, and let the latent willingness become turnout.
If you want to learn how to design the path from intention to action so that willingness actually converts, that is exactly the kind of work our Behavioural Design training is built around.
Frequently asked questions
Why does placing polling stations in schools increase turnout?
It removes a specific friction that sits exactly at the gap between intention and action. Research by André Blais on turnout and electoral design finds that even small reductions in distance or inconvenience produce disproportionately large effects on actual voting, precisely because most people already want to vote. The motivation was never the binding constraint; the environment was. A polling station within walking distance in a familiar building does not inspire anyone, it simply removes the obstacle that was quietly defeating their existing intention.
How do I apply the friction reduction principle in my own organisation?
Start by mapping every step between where a person currently is and the behaviour you want them to perform, then ask which of those steps require effort that has nothing to do with the behaviour itself. Registration forms, approval chains, unfamiliar locations, inconvenient timing: these are not features of the behaviour, they are friction layered on top of it. Remove them before you consider any motivational campaign. The question to ask is not "how do we make people care more?" but "what is stopping the people who already care from acting?"
Does compulsory voting explain Brazil's high turnout, or does the design?
Compulsion sets a floor, but it does not explain the full picture, and it is not the behavioural mechanism worth learning from. Countries with compulsory voting laws vary significantly in actual turnout depending on how that obligation is embedded in the environment. What Brazil does beyond compulsion is make voting easy, local, and socially framed as a communal occasion, which is the part that converts latent willingness into actual votes. Arend Lijphart's research on unequal participation points to the structural and environmental conditions under which civic behaviour either concentrates among certain groups or becomes genuinely universal: design is the decisive variable, not the law alone.
Why does adding a social occasion to voting matter behaviourally?
Because it changes the act from an obligation to something with immediate social reward. Pure obligation creates compliance pressure but no pull; a positive social frame adds a reason to show up that works in the present moment, not only in the abstract future of civic duty. Brazil's election-day culture, with music, family participation and a communal atmosphere, turns a solitary administrative task into something people do together. The behaviour stays the same; the context around it makes the threshold feel entirely different. That is not a small aesthetic detail, it is the mechanism by which latent willingness becomes a vote.
If you want to learn how to design for behaviour rather than trying to motivate it, that's exactly what the Behavioural Design Fundamentals Course covers. View upcoming dates →
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