TY - JOUR
AU - Mello, Marco
AU - Moscelli, Giuseppe
PY - 2023
DA - July
TI - Voting, contagion and the trade-off between public health and political rights: Quasi-experimental evidence from the Italian 2020 polls
JO - Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization
EP - 1052
VL - 200
DO - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2022.07.008
AB - 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.
PB - Elsevier
UR - https://hdl.handle.net/2164/21861
KW - Coronavirus (COVID-19)
ER