Abstract
The novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) and the associated Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic have had far-reaching health, economic, social and political impacts. The latter is the focus of this research note, which proposes using a difference-in-differences approach to estimate the electoral impact of reported SARS-CoV-2 infection rates. The approach is illustrated using data from the 2020 Croatian parliamentary election. The outcomes of interest are the vote shares for the dominant Croatian Democratic Union party, as well as the turnout. The analysis concludes that there is no evidence that reported county-level infection rates affected Croatian Democratic Union support or turnout. However, results using this approach may be affected by the statistical power of the analysis, issues related to causal identification and reliability of infection rate measures. Nonetheless, the difference-in-differences approach can potentially be applied in contexts around the world to estimate the electoral impact of reported SARS-CoV-2 infection rates.
Highlights
The novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) and associated acute respiratory Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) first came to light in December 2019, when a cluster of cases of pneumonia was identified in Wuhan, the capital of the Chinese province of Hubei
Perhaps there will be a deferred electoral response to SARS-CoV-2, and this can be incorporated into the framework in equation (5) by adding future election years and the interaction term with the measure of SARS-CoV-2 infections
The results from the current analysis should be taken with caution, since there are only 21 Croatian counties, and so the statistical power of the analysis would only pick up larger effects
Summary
The novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) and associated acute respiratory Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) first came to light in December 2019, when a cluster of cases of pneumonia was identified in Wuhan, the capital of the Chinese province of Hubei. The initial SARS-CoV-2 outbreaks and associated restrictions occurred across Europe in spring 2020, but as the number of new infections began to decrease, governments across the continent began to relax related measures With this loosening of restrictions came an attempted return to ‘normal’ competitive electoral politics, with nationwide elections occurring in Poland, Serbia, Croatia and Iceland during June and July 2020. Since such elections were held in the months following the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, the polls potentially provide insights into the political impact of the pandemic within these countries
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