Voting, contagion and the trade-off between public health and political rights: Quasi-experimental evidence from the Italian 2020 polls

Abstract

Natural disasters raise challenging trade-offs between public health safety 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.

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This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

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Identifiers

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2022.07.008

Repository URI

https://hdl.handle.net/2164/21861