The Impact of Corona Populism : Empirical Evidence from Austria and Theory

I study the impact of opposition politics aimed at downplaying the threat of Covid-19. Exploiting a policy U-turn of a major Austrian right-wing party (FPÖ), I show that Covid-19 deaths per capita are significantly positively correlated with support for the FPÖ only after the turn using panel regressions. Paradoxically, there is no statistically significant correlation with the reported number of infections. I hypothesize that this can be traced back to a self-selection bias in testing, which causes a higher dark figure in FPÖ strongholds. I find empirical support for this hypothesis in individual-level data from a Covid-19 prevalence study showing a much higher share of (undetected) cases among “corona skeptics”. I finally extend the classical SIRD model to incorporate conditional quarantine and heterogeneous mixing of two groups of agents with behavioral differences and explore its partly non-trivial properties using thousands of numerical simulations. This model can explain the puzzling empirics: if the behavioral differences between the two groups are sufficiently different, an increase in the share of “corona skeptics” can cause an increase in the number of deaths without increasing the number of reported infections