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.
Georgy Tarasenko (HSE) and Alexei Zakharov(HSE) will present the paper “Electronic voting and COVID”.
Registration: till noon of September 28, link to video-conference will be sent up to 5 p.m. (Moscow time). Person with HSE pass may visit the seminar at the HSE campus at Pokrovka (11 Pokrovsky Boulevard, room S1013).
Abstract:
Electronic voting can help to reduce voting costs but may be distrusted by some, especially pro-opposition voters in regimes with poor institutional quality. Hence, electronic voting can disproportionally benefit regime supporters. We test this hypothesis by studying voting returns from the 2020 Russian constitutional plesbicite. The voting costs are instrumented with a measure of COVID exposure obtained from a dataset of COVID hospitalizations, geolocated at the electoral precinct level. We find that, as predicted by the theory, larger exposure to COVID-19 increased electronic voter registration inmore pro-government electoral precincts, and decreased electronic voting in pro-opposition precincts. The findings show that autocrats can use alternative voting technologies for their benefit, by selectively increasing turnout among their supporters.