Saving Lives or the Economy? The Incumbent Support During the Pandemic in Russia

• In Event: Government and Citizen Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

During the pandemic of the novel coronavirus, which is also known as 2019-nCoV or COVID-19, people around the world had to make meaningful decisions to prevent the further spread of the virus. In the same manner, governments of various countries also made their decisions about how to respond to the pandemic and which regulations to enforce. While the potential positive effects on the death toll of such measures as quarantine or stay-at-home order were found to slow down the spread of the disease, it was also shown that for many countries such policies costed severe economic contractions. Hence, policymakers found themselves in a quite difficult position - they had to decide whether to save lives or save the economy? The reason why politicians are so concerned about this trade-off is that according to the theory of retrospective voting citizens consider information on past government performance to make forward-looking decisions. However, there is no consensus with regards to the question of which exact factors - given the COVID-19 context, either saving the economy or dealing with the public health crisis - are valued by voters more. The COVID-19 pandemic will probably affect many elections around the world, as many authors have discussed, the election-year economy has a large impact on voting behavior whereas conditions in other years have little effect on election outcomes. Besides that, the theory of noneconomic retrospective voting can also explain why voters, who are likely to hold incumbents accountable for the toll of the virus, could form their preferences in favor or against incumbents given their ability to manage the public health crisis. Following these two paradigms, the first studies of the US presidential elections have been already published, and the appreciable effect of the COVID-related policies on voting behavior and political preferences was found. The proposed research is in line with the emerging studies and elaborates the question of whether economic performance during the pandemic or the success of an incumbent's policy to preclude the further spread of the virus plays a greater role in supporting the incumbent and making a deliberate decision about the incumbent's reelection. To answer this question, we conducted two experimental studies with the same 2x2 design, where the factors of economic performance (low vs. high) and the pandemic death toll (low vs. high) were manipulated. In these experiments, we provided respondents with information about an imagined regional governor’s economic performance and COVID-19 death toll. We reaped the benefits of the variation in regional authorities' response to the pandemic in different regions of the Russian Federation, as the result of which economic costs and the pandemic death toll varied from region to region. Hence, although we asked about the imaginary scenario, there are real-life examples of regional policies that either saved the economy of a region or allowed to stop the growth of a number of the sick. The first study was conducted online using the OMI panel of respondents with the use of nationally represented quotas (N=1,500), while the second study was a telephone survey (CATI) with the probability sampling (N=3,000). As the main dependent variables, we used participants' support of an incumbent's policy, willingness to expand their powers, and voting for an incumbent. We found that while the success of an incumbent's policy to preclude the further spread of the virus is more important for the support of an incumbent's policy, high economic performance is more important for the willingness to expand powers and voting. Our research thus contributes to the literature on economic voting and argues that while noneconomic factors are important for the performance evaluation, the state of the economy plays a crucial role in the voting for an incumbent and the willingness to expand their powers.

Authors

• Kirill Chmel, National Research University "Higher School of Economics"

• Aigul Klimova

• Nikita Savin, National Research University "Higher School of Economics"