Do elections accelerate the COVID-19 pandemic?

Abstract

Elections define representative democracies but also produce spikes in physical mobility if voters need to travel to polling places. In this paper, we examine whether large-scale, in-person elections propagate the spread of COVID-19. We exploit a natural experiment from the Czech Republic, which biannually renews mandates in one-third of Senate constituencies that rotate according to the 1995 election law. We show that in the second and third weeks after the 2020 elections (held on October 9–10), new COVID-19 infections grew significantly faster in voting compared to non-voting constituencies. A temporarily related peak in hospital admissions and essentially no changes in test positivity rates suggest that the acceleration was not merely due to increased testing. The acceleration did not occur in the population above 65, consistently with strategic risk-avoidance by older voters. Our results have implications for postal voting reforms or postponing of large-scale, in-person (electoral) events during viral outbreaks.

Voting, contagion and the trade-off between public health and political rights: Quasi-experimental evidence from the Italian 2020 polls

“…Overall, our study suggests that national-level polls might contribute to the spread of airborne diseases like COVID-19, and thus they can spark national waves of contagion if held during peak periods of an epidemics. These findings are in line with a recent analysis by Palguta et al. (2022) , who exploit a similar institutional setting in the Czech Republic to examine the epidemic effects of the second round of the 2020 Senate elections, which were held only in a random subset of all the national constituencies.…”

“…The findings from both works are qualitatively and quantitatively similar, since we find that post-poll new COVID-19 infections were about 1.1% higher for each additional percentage point of turnout. However, our analysis presents several distinctive contribution with respect to Palguta et al. (2022) : we account for the possible spillover effects of new COVID-19 infections by means of a spatial model including weighted averages of new weekly COVID-19 cases in neighboring municipalities as additional controls; and we employ an event-study design with a Control Function strategy, as we are concerned with the endogeneity of turnout due to self-selectivity of voters stemming from the unobservable trade-off between the individual expected utility from casting a ballot and the health risk of contracting the virus.…”

“…Overall, few studies have investigated the impact of voting on public health outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic. The closest study to ours is Palguta et al. (2022) , which examines the impact of the Czech Republic 2020 Senate elections on the spread of COVID-19 and documents a higher increase in the growth rates of COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations in sub-regions where this electoral round took place.…”

“…(2022) : we account for the possible spillover effects of new COVID-19 infections by means of a spatial model including weighted averages of new weekly COVID-19 cases in neighboring municipalities as additional controls; and we employ an event-study design with a Control Function strategy, as we are concerned with the endogeneity of turnout due to self-selectivity of voters stemming from the unobservable trade-off between the individual expected utility from casting a ballot and the health risk of contracting the virus. Moreover, our study differs from Palguta et al. (2022) as we analyze the effect of voters’ turnout as a measure of treatment intensity rather than just treatment assignment (i.e.…”

“…With this work, we aim to shed light on this important public health issue linking voting and the spread of infections diseases, and to quantify the value of the trade-off between public health and political rights. In particular, our analysis adds to the literature that evaluates empirically whether and by how much voting can increase COVID contagion ( Cotti, Engelhardt, Foster, Nesson, Niekamp, 2021 , Bertoli, Guichard, Marchetta, 2020 , Bach, Guillouzouic, Malgouyres, 2021 ), but it is also one of the few studies doing so by exploiting a natural experiment ( Palguta et al., 2022 ).…”