 Canada’s “COVID-19 Referendum”: Voting in the Early Federal Election of 2021Joseph 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 relate to voter turnout and party vote shares? Harmonizing electoral districts of official voting data to the more aggregate health regions of COVID data, this is the first study to comprehensively examine COVID severity and voting 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. Conversely, local voter turnout was slightly higher when moving from COVID-induced to more COVID-reduced partisanship, as well as from Liberal to more Conservative partisanship. Keywords: Canada; COVID-19; Early Elections; Public Health; Voting (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: 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. |
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