Abstract
Natural disasters raise challenging trade-offs between public health safety and inalienable rights like the active involvement in political choices through voting. We exploit a quasi -experimental setting provided by multiple ballots across regions and municipalities during the Italian 2020 elections to estimate the effect of voters' turnout on the spread of COVID-19. By employing an event-study design with a two-stage Control Function strategy, we find that post-poll new COVID infections increased by an average of 1.1% for each addi-tional percentage point of turnout. Based on these estimates and real political events, we also show through a simulation that in-person voting during a high-infection regime may have a large impact on public health outcomes, more than doubling new infections, deaths and hospitalizations. These findings suggest that policy-makers' responses to natural disasters should be flexible and contingent to the emergency severity, in order to minimize social costs for citizens.O 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )