Blowing in the wind: COVID and political support in Brazil
I investigate the impact of city-level excess mortality on former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s electoral performance in 2022. First, I provide evidence of a robust relationship between wind and COVID-induced excess mortality. In particular, cities with relatively high wind speeds during COVID-19 waves present lower overall excess mortality. Second, I use variations in wind timing as an instrumental variable for city-level deaths and present a causal argument that increases in mortality decreased Bolsonaro’s vote share in 2022. My most conservative estimates indicate that a one third reduction in excess mortality during the pandemic would have been enough to secure a win for Bolsonaro. Using data on state governors’ reelection campaigns, I do not find evidence that the results are driven by incumbency effects, and instead seem to be idiosyncratic to the ex-president. I also present a novel method for the construction of counterfactuals relying on neural networks, which provides results consistent with those of my main analysis.