The Effects of COVID-19 Pandemic Perceptions on Voter Turnout in the Czech Republic

Abstract

This article answers the question how the COVID-19 pandemic influenced voter turnout on the individual level in the Czech 2020 regional election. Several hypotheses connected to perceived danger caused by the pandemic on a voter’s decision to vote or not are tested. It is expected that perceived danger of the pandemic deters people from attending an election, and that such a constraint would be higher for those who know many infected people than for those who do not, for elderly people more than for younger people, and for women more than for men. The test of our hypotheses was executed by quasibinomial logistic regression with data on 866 respondents from a post-electoral survey. The direct effect of the perceived danger and effect of interaction between age and perceived danger was not found. The effect of perceived danger works for women but not for men. Finally, there is no effect of the perception of the danger of a pandemic when people do not know any infected people, but there is a strong negative impact in the case when they know a lot of them.