🔎 What the Study Tests:

This study investigates whether anxiety increases voters' intensity of preference for the status quo, producing a political "flight to safety" that advantages establishment candidates during crises.

🧭 How the Pandemic Was Used to Identify Causal Effects:

The abrupt outbreak of the novel coronavirus during the 2020 Democratic primary is leveraged as a plausibly exogenous shock to voter anxiety. Using the timing and geography of the outbreak to identify effects on voting, the analysis finds a clear causal impact: Joseph Biden gained between 7 and 15 percentage points at the expense of Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary.

🧪 Experimental Evidence of Anxiety-Induced Conservatism:

A complementary survey experiment with US-based respondents exposed to an anxiety-inducing prompt shows higher selection of the less disruptive, more establishment-like hypothetical candidate — consistent with a heightened intensity of status-quo preference under anxiety.

🌍 Additional Cases Showing Broader Relevance:

Evidence from 2020 French municipal elections and multiple US House primary contests indicates that the COVID-induced flight to safety generalized beyond the Democratic primary, benefiting mainstream candidates in diverse institutional settings.

Key details and data sources:

• Natural experiment exploiting the timing/location of the COVID outbreak during the 2020 Democratic primary
• Estimated effect on Biden: +7 to +15 percentage points vs. Sanders
• Survey experiment with anxiety-inducing prompt among US respondents
• Corroborating evidence from 2020 French municipal and US House primary elections

⚖️ Why This Matters:

Findings reveal an underappreciated mechanism by which anxiety reshapes electoral choice: crises increase the intensity of status-quo preferences and can materially shift support toward "safe" or establishment candidates. This has implications for understanding short-term electoral dynamics in crises and for theories of voter risk preferences and candidate selection.