Electoral concerns reduce restrictive measures during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

We thank Leander Heldring, Julien Labonne, Carlo Medici and Juan F. Vargas for helpful comments and suggestions. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

Do elections accelerate the COVID-19 pandemic?

“…Finally, we contribute to the studies on the electoral implications of viral outbreaks. In this strand, Pulejo and Querubín (2021) find that incumbents who can run for reelection implement less stringent anti-pandemic restrictions when elections are closer in time. Amuedo-Dorantes et al (2021) moreover suggest that political ideology might compromise the efficacy of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) as the adoption speed of NPIs during the COVID-19 crisis appeared to be less effective in Republican counties.…”

Cross-National Measures of the Intensity of COVID-19 Public Health Policies

“…Countries with weaker state institutions and more corrupt bureaucracies were less likely to impose restrictions on businesses, which may suggest that powerful economic actors were able to resist pressures to shut down in the face of the pandemic (Kubinec, Lee, and Tomashevskiy 2020;Gallego, Prem, and Vargas 2020;Crosson and Parinandi 2021). Following a similar logic, the association that democracies on average imposed fewer business restrictions may suggest that the increased accountability of leaders made it harder for them to impose harsher types of policies on citizens, as some prior research has shown leaders reduced restrictions during elections (Pulejo and Querubín 2020).…”

“…For these reasons, we believe it is crucial for the academic community to have access to comprehensive and accurate data on the full range of policies undertaken by governments across the world in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Doing so is necessary to be able to answer questions about the effect of different policies, not only in terms of combating COVID-19 infections, but also on a diverse array of socioeconomic outcomes, including mental health (Fetzer et al 2020;Varga et al 2021;Yamada et al 2021;Zettler et al 2021), economic hardship (Demirgüç-Kunt, Lokshin, and Torre 2020; Maloney and Taskin 2020; Kubinec, Lee, and Tomashevskiy 2020;Brodeur et al 2020;Bonaccorsi et al 2020;Ashraf 2020;Adams-Prassl et al 2020), political partisanship (Adida, Dionne, and Platas 2020;Woolhandler et al 2021;Pulejo and Querubín 2020;Painter and Qiu 2020;Hart, Chinn, and Soroka 2020;Gadarian, Goodman, and Pepinsky 2020;Dave, Friedson, Matsuzawa, Sabia, and Safford 2020;Bol et al 2021), and the reasons why some countries were better positioned to implement higher levels of restrictions to control the pandemic (Bargain and Aminjonov 2020;Borgonovi and Andrieu 2020;Fan, Orhun, and Turjeman 2020;Barceló and Sheen 2020). Given the scale and complexity of this measurement problem, we believe it is necessary to leverage multiple datasets to be able to validate the underlying indicators given how complex the coding process of these policies is.…”

World Economic Outlook, October 2020

“…Some empirical analyses also document a significant role of social distancing and lockdowns in slowing the spread of the coronavirus (Chernozhukov, Kasahara, and Schrimpf 2020;Ciminelli and Garcia-Mandico 2020;Dave and others 2020a;Deb and others 2020b;Demirgüç-Kunt, Lokshin, and Torre 2020;di Porto, Naticchioni, and Scrutinio 2020;Fang, Wang, and Yang 2020;Friedson and others 2020;Glaeser, Gorback, and (Chiou and Tucker 2020), electoral concerns (Pulejo and Querubín 2020), labor precariousness (Levy Yeyati and Sartorio 2020), or sick leave policies (Andersen and others 2020b). Some of these papers also argue that less restrictive mitigation policies, such as wearing face masks and mass testing, can play an important role in slowing the spread of infection (Chernozhukov, Kasahara, and Schrimpf 2020;Gapen and others 2020).…”