RT Journal Article
T1 Do elections accelerate the COVID-19 pandemic?: Evidence from a natural experiment
A1 Palguta, Jan
A1 Levınský, René
A1 Skoda, Samuel
AB Elections define representative democracies but also produce spikes in physicalmobility if voters need to travel to polling places. In this paper, we examine whetherlarge-scale, in-person elections propagate the spread of COVID-19. We exploit anatural experiment from the Czech Republic, which biannually renews mandates inone-third of Senate constituencies that rotate according to the 1995 election law. Weshow that in the second and third weeks after the 2020 elections (held on October9–10), new COVID-19 infections grew significantly faster in voting comparedto non-voting constituencies. A temporarily related peak in hospital admissions andessentially no changes in test positivity rates suggest that the acceleration was notmerely due to increased testing. The acceleration did not occur in the populationabove 65, consistently with strategic risk-avoidance by older voters. Our resultshave implications for postal voting reforms or postponing of large-scale, in-person(electoral) events during viral outbreaks.
PB Springer
SN 0933-1433
YR 2022
FD 2022-01-01
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10016/34395
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10016/34395
LA eng
NO We would like to thank PAQ Research agency for sharing data from the “Life during the Pandemic” panel survey with us. Palguta gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Community of Madrid via grants 2017/T2-SOC-5363 and EPUC3M11 (V PRICIT). Levínsky was supported by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic through the project SHARE–CZ+ (CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_013/0001740).
DS e-Archivo
RD 1 sept. 2024