Politicians poll fate not tied to handling of coronavirus pandemic, shows survey

NEW DELHI: Politicians are unlikely to be punished or rewarded for their handling of the pandemic in the next election, an analysis of survey data from India, the US and the UK has found.
The survey published in the journal BMJ Global Health found that how Covid-19 was managed by politicians may not affect poll outcomes at all. This is despite respondents admitting that health is a key policy area and agreeing that politicians messed up handling of the pandemic. In the early months of the lockdown, experts had predicted that health and handling of the Covid-19 crisis would likely become poll issues.

The BMJ survey was conducted between April and June on 3,648 participants of which 1,499 were from India — mostly affluent and largely from states in south India. The format of the survey involved revealing key facts about either the economic impact of the pandemic or the health impact ( two ‘treatment’ groups), or revealing no key facts (comparison group).

Participants were asked questions designed to understand attitudes towards their government, their leaders and voting intentions if an election were held that day.

Researchers Arnab Acharya, an independent researcher in the UK, John Gerring (University of Texas, Austin) and Aaron Reeves (department of social policy & intervention, University of Oxford, UK) said they expected the respondents in the treatment group to favour or disfavour the incumbent and assign blame to the government for the pandemic compared to the control group.

“We observe no such results,” they wrote in the study. “People in the US, the UK and India are extremely concerned about the pandemic. Yet, we find no evidence that these worries translate into changes in political behaviour,” the researchers said.

According to the researchers, one reason for this finding could be that public health is not viewed as a political issue. “But people do think health is an important policy area (more than 85% agree) and that the government has some responsibility for health (over 90% agree). Another reason could be that people view public health policies through partisan lenses, which means that health is largely endogenous, and yet we find little evidence of polarisation in our data,” they wrote. Acharya said the results were the same across the US and the UK but what was different in case of India was that incumbency was favoured more strongly.