Turnout in the time of corona: evidence from the legislative elections in Korea

ABSTRACT

This paper reports empirical evidence on the impact of the prevalence of COVID-19 on voter turnout, using the data from the legislative elections in Korea. To control for the time-invariant constituency-specific factors, I regress the first-difference in turnout, i.e. the change from the previous election, on the cumulative number of COVID-19 cases per resident. The results show a substantially negative impact. The share of old-age voters, who are known to face worse health risks of COVID-19 infection, amplifies this impact. These findings raise the question whether it is more democratic to hold elections as scheduled, as opposed to postponing them, during a pandemic.

KEYWORDS:

• Voter turnout
• COVID-19
• election
• pandemic

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• D72
• I18

Acknowledgments

I thank the editor and the anonymous referee for helpful comments and suggestions. All remaining errors are mine.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ CNN (15 April 2020), ‘South Korea is holding an election during the coronavirus crisis. Other countries are postponing theirs. Either way, democracy may suffer’.

² I thank the anonymous referee for the suggestion to show this first.

³ See, for instance, the ‘e-Briefing’ (in Korean) by the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on 23 January 2020 www.korea.kr/news/policyBriefingView.do?newsId=156372621 (accessed on 9 August 2021), and the Dongascience article (in Korean) on 6 March 2020 www.dongascience.com/news.php?idx=34896 (accessed on 9 August 2021).