Does Holding Elections during a Covid-19 Pandemic Put the Lives of Politicians at Risk?

Bach, Laurent; Guillouzouic, Arthur; Malgouyres, Clément

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3635730

Cited by 8 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…Going to the polls to exercise the right to vote could indeed increase cases of virus infection among voters and the incidence of mortality from COVID-19, especially among elderly people ( Bertoli et al, 2020 , Santana et al, 2020 ). Moreover, participation in assemblies and rallies during the election campaign may make gatherings risky and spread the virus infection among political candidates and participants ( Bach et al, 2021 , Cipullo and Moglie, 2021 ). Voters can choose between not voting or exercising their civic duty with the risk of infection.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on voter turnout

Picchio

Santolini

2022

European Journal of Political Economy

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The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the risk of participating in public events, among them elections. We assess whether the voter turnout in the 2020 local government elections in Italy was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. We do so by exploiting the variation among municipalities in the intensity of the COVID-19 outbreak as measured by the mortality rate among the elderly. We find that a 1 percentage point increase in the elderly mortality rate decreased the voter turnout by 0.5 percentage points, with no gender differences in the behavioural response. The effect was especially strong in densely populated municipalities. We do not detect statistically significant differences in voter turnout among different levels of autonomy from the central government.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on voter turnout

Picchio

Santolini

2022

European Journal of Political Economy

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“…In this respect, Cotti et al (2021) abstain from causal language as they recognize that the number of polling stations per voter might be endogenously set. Bertoli et al (2020) predict turnout using the intensity of local electoral competition, but, as pointed out by Bach et al (2021), their estimates are attributable to measurement error. Other studies either assume turnout to be fully exogenous with respect to pre-electoral pandemic conditions or do not discuss that many socio-economic determinants of turnout might also shape the trajectories of pandemic spread and compliance with mitigation policies.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do elections accelerate the COVID-19 pandemic?

2021

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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.

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“…Another strand of the literature studies the potential channels of transmission of the epidemic. In particular, recent works focus on the role of occupational exposure (Almagro and Orane-Hutchinson, 2020;Lewandowski, 2020), economic activities' concentration (Ascani et al (2020)), urban density (Carozzi (2020)), presence of care homes (Alacevich et al (2020)), mass protests (Dave et al (2020)) or elections (Bach et al (2020)) in the spread of the epidemic.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Poorly Understood Disease? The Unequal Distribution of Excess Mortality Due to COVID-19 Across French Municipalities

Brandily

Brébion²,

Briole

et al. 2020

SSRN Journal

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While COVID-19 was responsible for more than 600,000 deaths worldwide as of July 24, 2020, very little is known about the socioeconomic heterogeneity of its impact on mortality. In this paper, we combine several administrative data sources to estimate the relationship between mortality due to COVID-19 and poverty at a very local level (i.e. the municipality level) in France, one of the most severely hit countries in the world. We find strong evidence of an income gradient in the impact of the pandemic on mortality rates, which is twice as large in municipalities below the 25th percentile of the national income distribution than in municipalities above this threshold. We then show that both poor housing conditions and higher occupational exposure play a key role in this heterogeneity: taken together, these mechanisms account for up to 77% of the difference observed between rich and poor municipalities.

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Does Holding Elections during a Covid-19 Pandemic Put the Lives of Politicians at Risk?

Cited by 8 publications

References 8 publications

The COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on voter turnout

The COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on voter turnout

Do elections accelerate the COVID-19 pandemic?

A Poorly Understood Disease? The Unequal Distribution of Excess Mortality Due to COVID-19 Across French Municipalities

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