A new GLO Discussion Paper assesses whether the voter turnout in the 2020 local government elections in Italy was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. It indeed finds that higher elderly mortality rates induced a decline in voter turnout.

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GLO Discussion Paper No. 812, 2021

The COVID-19 Pandemic’s Effects on Voter Turnout – Download PDF
by Picchio, Matteo & Santolini, Raffaella

GLO Fellow Matteo Picchio

Author Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the risk of participating in public events, among them elections. We assess whether the voter turnout in the 2020 local government elections in Italy was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. We do so by exploiting the variation among municipalities in the intensity of the COVID-19 outbreak as measured by the mortality rate among the elderly. We find that a 1 percentage point increase in the elderly mortality rate decreased the voter turnout by 0.5 percentage points, with no gender differences in the behavioural response. The effect was especially strong in densely populated municipalities. We do not detect statistically significant heterogeneous effects between the North and the South or among different levels of autonomy from the central government.

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GLO Discussion Papers are research and policy papers of the GLO Network which are widely circulated to encourage discussion. Provided in cooperation with EconStor, a service of the ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, GLO Discussion Papers are among others listed in RePEc (see IDEAS,  EconPapers). Complete list of all GLO DPs – downloadable for free.

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