Losers get sick? The effects of electoral defeat on perceptions of pandemic risk

Giuliano Bobba,Federico Vegetti,Antonella Seddone,Franca Roncarolo,Moreno Mancosu

doi:10.36253/qoe-10749

Abstract

Research in political behavior shows that citizens update their past perceptions and future expectations over several phenomena depending on whether their favorite party wins or loses the elections. This bias is explained by different psychological mechanisms triggered by individuals' attachment and trust in political parties. In this paper we investigate whether such a winner-loser effect conditions people's concerns about the Covid-19 pandemic. We leverage the occurrence of regional elections in six Italian regions in September 2020, right at the onset of the second wave of the pandemic in the country, to test whether supporting a candidate who won/lost the elections affects (1) people's fear to get sick with Covid-19, and (2) their expectation about the gravity of the upcoming second wave. Given that the public healthcare system in Italy is managed by the regions, we expect supporters of the losing candidate to lose trust in the region's ability to deal with the pandemic, hence increasing their personal concerns. We test this expectation using pre/post election panel data, and employing respondents from the other regions who voted at a concurrent referendum as a placebo group. Our results show that, while overall concerns tend to decrease from the first to the second wave, for elections losers they remain unchanged. This indicates that losing an election, albeit second-order, can affect citizens' outlook on future events in domains that are largely beyond political control.

Highlights

The COVID-19 pandemic has had an enormous impact in nearly every aspect of public and private life worldwide
Literature emphasizes that losers in electoral competitions are generally less satisfied with democracy with respect to winners (Anderson and Guillory 1997; Hansen et al, 2019). These findings provide an example of the fact that partisanship represents an important driving force for people’s beliefs and attitudes on several political and societal issues
An interesting result is that almost no coefficients of the control variables have strong and significant effects on the change in risk perceptions

Summary

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic has had an enormous impact in nearly every aspect of public and private life worldwide. Painter and Qiu (2021) found, looking at geolocation data sourced from smartphones, that residents in Republican counties were less likely to align with government mandates in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. Related to this result, other findings demonstrate, by using the geotracking of several million smartphones per day, that citizens who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 were less keen to observe social distancing compared to former Hillary Clinton voters (Gollwitzer et al, 2020). Other studies have found that Republicans are less prone to get vaccinated against COVID-19 with respect to Democrats (Kreps et al, 2020)

Objectives

Results

Conclusion