NES Center for the Study of Diversity and Social Interactions and HSE International Center for the Study of Institutions and Development are happy to invite you to our joint meeting of the Research Seminar on Diversity and Development and HSE Seminar on Political Economy.
Christoph Koenig (University of Bristol) will present the paper “The Political Effects of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic in Germany”.
Registration: till noon of April 27th, link to video-conference will be sent up to 5 p.m. (Moscow time).
Abstract:
Do public health crises affect countries' political landscapes? When the 1918 influenza pandemic broke out in Germany, it was on the verge of losing WW1. To maintain order, the government largely suppressed public information on the disease. Using a constituency-level panel of election results from 1893 to 1933, we estimate the political effect of pandemic severity in a Differences-in-Differences framework. Local pandemic severity is calculated from excess mortality in 1918 for all 362 constituencies of Interwar Germany. We provide evidence that 1918 excess mortality reflects influenza-related deaths rather than other diseases or WW1 fatalities using detailed cause-of-death data for more than 100 German cities. Baseline results show that 1918 excess mortality is associated with a lasting shift of votes toward leftwing parties. We explore several mechanisms that may explain this finding.