Elections and (mis)reporting of COVID-19 mortality: a quasi-natural experiment

Abstract We investigate the effect of direct presidential elections on underreporting COVID-19 mortality, measured as the difference between excess mortality and official statistics. Our identification strategy leverages a natural experiment of the unanticipated onset of the Coronavirus pandemic in 2020 and the asymmetric electoral schedule of presidential elections around the world, in which some countries faced the pandemic with upcoming elections in the next 2 years, while others did not have this electoral pressure. Contrary to conventional wisdom that governments manipulate COVID figures downward to avoid being seen as weak in the politically sensitive times, we find that governments facing elections in the following years report COVID fatalities more truthfully. This effect explains one-fourth of the variation in data manipulation. Further heterogeneous analysis shows that the effect is primarily driven by high-quality democratic elections. Finally, we provide some suggestive evidence for OECD countries that underreporting is strongly negatively correlated with trust in government, thus imposing political costs before the election, which may serve as an explanation of why democratic governments seek to avoid data manipulation during election times.