Compliance with restrictive measures during the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe: Does political partisanship influence behavioural responses?

TL;DR

This study examines whether political partisanship influences compliance with COVID-19 restrictions in Europe, finding no consistent link between voting patterns and mobility reductions across six countries.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of the relationship between political vote shares and mobility during the pandemic in multiple European countries, challenging assumptions of a systematic partisan effect.

Findings

No consistent pattern between vote shares and mobility changes.

Relationships between mobility and vote shares vary over time.

Partisan voting patterns do not systematically predict compliance.

Abstract

The success of public health policies aimed at curtailing the COVID-19 pandemic have relied on large-scale and protracted compliance by the public. A series of studies have recently argued that previous voting patterns are important predictors of such compliance. Our research further investigates such connection by tracking the relationships between parties' vote shares and mobility in six European countries over an extended period of time. We observe that while vote shares are occasionally related to variations in mobility within each country, there is no systematic pattern of decrease or increase in mobility across all six selected countries depending on party family or government membership. Over time, the relationships between mobility and vote shares tend to grow stronger in some but not all countries, again suggesting that there is no clear connection between vote shares for several party families and compliance with social distancing measures.