Messias’ Influence? Intra-Municipal Relationship between Political Preferences and Deaths in a Pandemic

Abstract Previous studies have shown that the percentage of votes for Jair Messias Bolsonaro in the 2018 presidential elections, at the municipal and state levels, is related to the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of the number of deaths. We find the same effects at the intra- -municipal level in the city of São Paulo. Using geolocation, we associate voting data with number of deaths for the 96 districts in the city. We analyze excess mortality to mitigate underreporting issues and to account for exogenous determinants of mortality, as well as control for age structure and several indicators of socioeconomic vulnerability. The results are significant and indicate the existence of a relationship between votes for Bolsonaro and deaths during the pandemic — between one and five additional deaths per 100k people for each percentage point of votes. Several robustness checks support our findings.