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

Marco Mello and Giuseppe Moscelli

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2022, vol. 200, issue C, 1025-1052

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.

Keywords: Voting; COVID-19; Public health; Civic capital; Event study; Endogeneity; Control Function (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 D72 H51 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Related works:
Working Paper: Voting, Contagion and the Trade-Off between Public Health and Political Rights: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from the Italian 2020 Polls (2021)
Working Paper: Voting, contagion and the trade-off between public health and political rights: quasi-experimental evidence from the Italian 2020 polls (2021)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jeborg:v:200:y:2022:i:c:p:1025-1052

DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2022.07.008

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