Political power of older voters, political alignment, and state responses to Covid-19

ABSTRACT

As older individuals are more vulnerable to the virus and are more likely to vote than younger individuals, a state with a higher share of the older population is expected to impose a more stringent measure. However, the analysis shows that political alignment between policymakers and older voters plays an important role in determining the stringency of a measure. Using data on statewide stay-at-home orders across 50 U.S. states, the analysis shows that political alignment affects the duration of orders for Republican-controlled states in a significant manner, but not for Democrat-controlled states.

KEYWORDS:

• Older voters
• political power
• political alignment
• pandemics
• mitigation measures

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• J1
• D6
• H1

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to an anonymous referee for helpful comments. This research was in part supported by a Critical Thinking (assigned time) Grant from the College of Arts and Letters at San Diego State University. 

Disclosure statement

I declare that I have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Notes

¹ They are Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming.

² States with no order are assumed to do so as of 26 March 2020, the average date among those states with orders, but different assumptions change the results little.

³ The analysis again concerns how the duration was determined at the time of issuing.

⁴ ICU beds are for specific types of care such as Cardiac ICU Beds and Burn ICU Beds (American Hospital Association 2020). These beds thus may not be easily converted to Covid-19 care.

⁵ The reason may be that deathrate was fairly low, zero or close to zero in many states, at the time of issuing orders.