How COVID-19 affects voting for incumbents: Evidence from local elections in France.

Autor: Morisi D; Department of Political Science and Public Management, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark.; Collegio Carlo Alberto, Turin, Italy., Cloléry H; CREST, École Polytechnique, IP Paris, Palaiseau, France., Kon Kam King G; CREST, École Polytechnique, IP Paris, Palaiseau, France.; INRAE, Université Paris-Saclay, Jouy-en-Josas, France., Schaub M; Department of Political Science, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany.; WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Berlin, Germany.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: PloS one [PLoS One] 2024 Mar 19; Vol. 19 (3), pp. e0297432. Date of Electronic Publication: 2024 Mar 19 (Print Publication: 2024).
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0297432
Abstrakt: How do voters react to an ongoing natural threat? Do voters sanction or reward incumbents even when incumbents cannot be held accountable because an unforeseeable natural disaster is unfolding? We address this question by investigating voters' reactions to the early spread of COVID-19 in the 2020 French municipal elections. Using a novel, fine-grained measure of the circulation of the virus based on excess-mortality data, we find that support for incumbents increased in areas that were particularly hard hit by the virus. Incumbents from both left and right gained votes in areas more strongly affected by COVID-19. We provide suggestive evidence for two mechanisms that can explain our findings: an emotional channel related to feelings of fear and anxiety, and a prospective-voting channel, related to the ability of incumbents to act more swiftly against the diffusion of the virus than challengers.
Competing Interests: NO authors have competing interests.
(Copyright: © 2024 Morisi et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)
Databáze: MEDLINE
Externí odkaz:
Nepřihlášeným uživatelům se plný text nezobrazuje