ArticleJournal of population economics2022
Do elections accelerate the COVID-19 pandemic?: Evidence from a natural experiment.
Article in Journal of population economics, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The trial behind it
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Combining and comparing regional SARS-CoV-2 epidemic dynamics in Italy: Bayesian meta-analysis of compartmental models and global sensitivity analysis.Frontiers in public health · 2022Pooled it
- The toll of voting in a pandemic? Regional elections and the spread of COVID-19 in Bavaria.The European journal of health economics : HEPAC : health economics in prevention and care · 2026Article
- Developing molecular surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 in the Czech Republic (2021-2022).Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Mass gatherings for political expression had no discernible association with the local course of the COVID-19 pandemic in the USA in 2020 and 2021.Nature human behaviour · 2023Article
- COVID-19 and democracy: a scoping review.BMC public health · 2023Article
- High-Speed railways and the spread of Covid-19.Travel behaviour & society · 2023Article
- Voting, contagion and the trade-off between public health and political rights: Quasi-experimental evidence from the Italian 2020 polls.Journal of economic behavior & organization · 2022Article
- To vote, or not to vote? Electoral campaigns and the spread of COVID-19.European journal of political economy · 2022Article
- The impact of 2020 French municipal elections on the spread of COVID-19.Journal of population economics · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Elections define representative democracies but also produce spikes in physical mobility if voters need to travel to polling places. In this paper, we examine whether large-scale, in-person elections propagate the spread of COVID-19. We exploit a natural experiment from the Czech Republic, which biannually renews mandates in one-third of Senate constituencies that rotate according to the 1995 election law. We show that in the second and third weeks after the 2020 elections (held on October 9-10), new COVID-19 infections grew significantly faster in voting compared to non-voting constituencies. A temporarily related peak in hospital admissions and essentially no changes in test positivity rates suggest that the acceleration was not merely due to increased testing. The acceleration did not occur in the population above 65, consistently with strategic risk-avoidance by older voters. Our results have implications for postal voting reforms or postponing of large-scale, in-person (electoral) events during viral outbreaks.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.