Семинар "Политическая экономика": Georgy Tarasenko и Alexei Zakharov (HSE) о влиянии короновируса на электронное голосование.

На семинаре "Политическая экономика" Georgy Tarasenko и Alexei Zakharov (HSE) рассказали о том, как коронавирус повлиял на электронное голосование.

Тема: Electronic voting and COVID

Аннотация:

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.