Canada’s “COVID-19 Referendum”: Voting in the Early Federal Election of 2021

Joseph Marchand and Yuhan Wang

No 2024-11, Working Papers from University of Alberta, Department of Economics

Abstract: Canada’s 2021 federal election was called early, less than two years after its previous election, and during the COVID-19 pandemic. This was the earliest called election in the fixed date era and additionally served as an unofficial referendum of the incumbent party’s pandemic response. How might that have influenced voting? Harmonizing electoral districts of official voting data to more aggregate health regions of COVID data, this is the first study to examine COVID severity and voting outcomes for Canada. Overall, local COVID severity was negatively associated with voter turnout in the 2021 election. Local COVID severity was also positively associated with Liberal, NDP, and Green party vote shares and negatively associated with Conservative, BQ, and People’s party vote shares. Based on these signed party associations with COVID severity, local voter turnout was slightly higher when moving from COVID-induced party domination toward more COVID-reduced party domination, and from Liberal to Conservative.

Keywords: Canada; COVID-19; Early Elections; Public Health; Voting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 H12 H51 I18 K16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36
Date: 2024-12-31
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://sites.ualberta.ca/~econwps/2024/wp2024-11.pdf Full text

Related works:
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:ris:albaec:2024_011

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Alberta, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joseph Marchand ().