Does Holding Elections during a Covid-19 Pandemic Put the Lives of Politicians at Risk?
Pre-print, Working paper: We estimate the impact of French town hall elections held in mid-March 2020 on themortality of 163,000 male candidates aged above 60. Their excess mortality during Marchand April was similar to the general population. We compare candidates in cities withtwo candidate lists to those in cities with only one list, as elections are more intense incontacts in the former group. We also use a regression discontinuity design and investigatemortality in 2020 depending on how candidates fared in the 2014 election. We cannot detectany causal effect of active participation in the 2020 elections on mortality.
Author(s)
Laurent Bach, Arthur Guillouzouic, Clément Malgouyres
Date of publication
- 2021
Keywords JEL
Keywords
- Covid-19 pandemic
- French elections
- Individual-level data
- Regression discontinuity design
Internal reference
- PSE Working Papers n°2020-45
URL of the HAL notice
Version
- 2