Does holding elections during a Covid-19 pandemic put the lives of politicians at risk?

Abstract

We estimate the impact of French town hall elections held in mid-March 2020 on the mortality of 170,000 male candidates aged above 60. Their excess mortality during March and April was similar to the general population. We compare candidates in cities with two candidate lists to those in cities with only one list, as elections are more intense in contacts in the former group. We also use a regression discontinuity design and investigate mortality in 2020 depending on how candidates fared in the 2014 election. We cannot detect any causal effect of active participation in the 2020 elections on mortality.

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

“…(2021) , who focus on the narrower research question whether there was a causal relationship between active participation and mortality among elderly male candidates to the same French local elections, using individual death records and a regression discontinuity design. Bach et al. (2021) do not find any significant effect on candidate politicians’ mortality, but the use of a selected sample in their analysis may cast doubts on the external validity of the effect; this is also because the turnout was particularly low, due to the likely strategic risk-compensating behaviour of voters.…”

“…The accuracy of Bertoli et al. (2020) ’s results is questioned by Bach et al. (2021) , who focus on the narrower research question whether there was a causal relationship between active participation and mortality among elderly male candidates to the same French local elections, using individual death records and a regression discontinuity design.…”

“…With this work, we aim to shed light on this important public health issue linking voting and the spread of infections diseases, and to quantify the value of the trade-off between public health and political rights. In particular, our analysis adds to the literature that evaluates empirically whether and by how much voting can increase COVID contagion ( Cotti, Engelhardt, Foster, Nesson, Niekamp, 2021 , Bertoli, Guichard, Marchetta, 2020 , Bach, Guillouzouic, Malgouyres, 2021 ), but it is also one of the few studies doing so by exploiting a natural experiment ( Palguta et al., 2022 ).…”

Do elections make you sick? Evidence from first‐time voters

“…Only recently have researchers investigated the effects of elections on physical health, and nearly of these studies consider how elections contributed to the spread of COVID‐19 (Bach et al., 2021; Bernheim et al., 2020; Bertoli et al., 2020; Cipullo & Le Moglie, 2021; Cotti et al., 2021; Lim et al., 2021; Palguta et al., 2022). In some cases, these and other studies are informative about the mechanisms through which elections affect health.…”

Covid-19 Outbreak in Europe and Its Impact Across Four Different Sectors: Analytical Research

“…The Journal of Health Economics (H-index 124) has published only one contribution satisfying the search parameters -a European study proposed by Bach, Guillouzouic and Malgouyres (2021). The authors have explored and discarded the possibility of a causal relation between elections held in the period of the pandemic (mid-March 2020) and the excess in mortality rates among senior candidates with respects with the male French population aged more than 60 years.…”