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.
Highlights
The dramatic onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, just like other large-scale emergencies, disrupted lives, businesses and communities worldwide as governments responded with extraordinary measures to battle the spread of the virus
We estimate the causal impact of holding large-scale, in-person elections on the viral spread of COVID-19
We avoid strong assumptions about voter turnout and pre-electoral pandemic trajectories by exploiting the natural experiment from the second round of the 2020 Senate elections in the Czech Republic, which renewed mandates in one-third of constituencies pre-selected according to a 25-year-old rotation rule
Summary
The dramatic onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, just like other large-scale emergencies, disrupted lives, businesses and communities worldwide as governments responded with extraordinary measures to battle the spread of the virus. Academic literature promptly attempted to quantify the impact of elections on the growth in new infections and mortality (Berry et al 2020; Feltham et al 2020; Leung et al 2020), but, contrary to widespread fears, found little evidence that elections would speed up pandemic growth. Evidence by Bertoli et al (2020), Cotti et al (2021), and Cassan and Sangnier (2020) hinted, in a stark contrast, that elections can be associated with significant speeding up of the pandemic These conflicting results make the challenge of defining a credible counterfactual in which one could track the same area (e.g. a country) simultaneously holding and abstaining from a massive electoral event even more salient.. The division into constituencies is permanent and does not correspond to a specific level of local government
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