"How does a public health crisis influence voting behaviour?" - New publication by Abelardo and Jana Gómez Díaz, published in Party Politics
Curious about the intersection of public health crises and political behaviour? In a recent publication in Party Politics, Abelardo and Jana Gómez Díaz explore the extent to which deaths caused by the COVID-19 pandemic influenced voters’ ability to coordinate effectively.
The authors analyse a sample of nearly two-thousand observations from Mexico’s 2021 general election and find that voters in municipalities with more pandemic deaths had a more difficult time agreeing on which of the main parties to support. It means that, in municipalities with more pandemic deaths, voters delivered a wider vote scatter than usual.
The study builds on Cox’s classic contribution that, under normal circumstances, citizens with clear and sufficient information about parties’ strengths and electoral viabilities tend to coordinate better. That is, that compared to citizens with ‘noisier’ or insufficient information, they tend to focus their support to a smaller set of options (or to deliver a narrower vote scatter). With this in mind, the authors test two possibilities. One, if the information environment caused by the COVID-19 pandemic made voters narrow their support towards a smaller and stronger set of options that they believed could best weather the crisis. Or two, if it made them widen their support across a broader and smaller set of options.
To test these possibilities, the authors conducted two sophisticated statistical analyses. The first was a multilevel model with random effects applied to an original dataset from Mexico's 2021 general election. And the second was a time-series cross-sectional model that compared the 2021 election with the two elections prior. The backdrop, of course, is stark. The general election occurred after 228,804 official accumulated deaths due to COVID-19. This translated to 1,794 deaths per million people, which was higher than the European Union’s and was comparable to the United States’.
A key finding from the multilevel analysis is that the pandemic did not help voter coordination. It suggests that the information environments caused by higher death tolls made it more difficult for voters to coordinate their support around a few common options. Instead, it made voters scatter their support across a broader set of options and thereby increase the size of their party systems.
This is consistent with existing literature on decision-making under complex and uncertain conditions. Noisy environments caused by emergencies or conditions of heightened risk can tend to complicate decision-making. Per the literature, voters can get confused, struggle with memory recalls, and even increase their reliance on all sorts of politically irrelevant cues. It seems that, in Mexico, the COVID-19 pandemic complicated voters' efforts to discern amongst which parties were best able to weather the crisis.
The study's findings offer a new dimension to the literature on electoral behaviour during crises. While many studies had focused on how the pandemic influenced polarization, support for incumbents, and political trust, this research highlights the specific issue of electoral coordination. It shows that in times of severe crisis, voters may struggle more than usual to rally around a few key options, leading to a more fragmented political landscape.
Access the study here: https://doi.org/10.1177/13540688241255340