@article{Mello_M-2023_149857,
title = {Voting, contagion and the trade-off between public health and political rights: Quasi-experimental evidence from the Italian 2020 polls},
author = {Mello, M. and Moscelli, G.},
month = {jul},
year = {2023},
abstract = {Natural disasters raise challenging trade-offs betweenpublic healthsafety and inalienable rights like the active involvement in political choices through voting. We exploit a quasi-experimental setting provided by multiple ballots across regions and municipalities during the Italian 2020 elections to estimate the effect of voters’ turnout on the spread of COVID-19. By employing an event-study design with a two-stage Control Function strategy, we find that post-poll new COVID infections increased by an average of 1.1% for each additional percentage point of turnout. Based on these estimates and real political events, we also show through a simulation that in-person voting during a high-infection regime may have a large impact on public health outcomes, more than doubling new infections, deaths and hospitalizations. These findings suggest that policy-makers’ responses to natural disasters should be flexible and contingent to the emergency severity, in order to minimize social costs for citizens.},
pages = {1025-1052},
volume = {200},
journal = {Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization},
publisher = {Elsevier},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2022.07.008},
}
