EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

How does COVID-19 affect electoral participation? evidence from the French municipal elections

Abdul Noury, Abel François, Olivier Gergaud and Alexandre Garel ()

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: This article investigates the effects of the COVID-19 outbreak on electoral participation. We study the French municipal elections that took place at the very beginning of the ongoing pandemic and held in over 9,000 municipalities on March 15, 2020. In addition to the simple note that turnout rates decreased to a historically low level, we establish a robust relationship between the depressed turnout rate and the disease. Using various estimation strategies and employing a large number of potential confounding factors, we find that the participation rate decreases with city proximity to COVID-19 clusters. Furthermore, the proximity has conditioned impacts according to the proportion of elderly –who are the most threatened– within the city. Cities with higher population density, where the risk of infection is higher, and cities where only one list ran at the election, which dramatically reduces competitiveness, experienced differentiated effects of distance.

Date: 2021-02-24
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Published in PLoS ONE, 2021, 16 (2), pp.e0247026. ⟨10.1371/journal.pone.0247026⟩

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
Journal Article: How does COVID-19 affect electoral participation? evidence from the French municipal elections (2021) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-03273681

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0247026

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-03273681