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Sick leave from work and the voting booth? A register-based study on health and turnout

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Abstract

Previous studies show that people with poor health have a lower propensity to vote. With individual-level register data on sickness allowance episodes and voting in three Finnish elections, we address the following questions: (1) What degree of sickness allowance days negatively influences turnout? (2) Are sickness absences on election day more harmful than absences that occur before the elections? (3) What is the effect of cumulative sickness allowance spells before the elections over a period of several years? We use a threefold categorisation approach, which differentiates between immediate, short-term and long-term health effects on voting. The results show that multiple sickness allowance spells over several years are more strongly connected to turnout than health problems experienced only in the year prior to the elections. Falling ill at the time of the elections had no consistent additional negative relationship with voting. We suggest that the demobilising effects of immediate health problems are associated with tangible factors, while long-term effects are related to lowered levels of political efficacy, interest and social connectedness.

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Notes

  1. Self-employed persons who are insured under the Self-Employed Persons’ Pensions Act or the Farmers’ Pensions Act are an exception to this rule. For them, the waiting period is only four days.

  2. We repeated the same analyses with the 2012 data using 67 years as the upper limit. The results are practically identical.

  3. Due to privacy reasons, the data set does not include any indicator of the respective electoral ward, thus making clustering or random-effect designs impossible.

  4. On the other hand, if all 12 Sunday dummies are simultaneously included in the same model, the results are somewhat different (the analysis is available from the authors upon request). In that case, the election Sunday dummy variable is the only one with a significant coefficient at the 99% confidence level (b = −0.048, p = 0.001). Adding other Sunday dummies only marginally attenuates the coefficient of the election Sunday. Correspondingly, when controlling for all the 12-day periods, the election period remains significant at the 99 percent level (b = −0.037, p < 0.001). Only one other period dummy was significant, namely, 36–47 days before elections (b = −0.039, p = 0.004). Thus, it seems that, when previous health history is controlled for, an illness suffered on the election Sunday could indeed have a small independent negative effect on voting.

  5. We tested interactions between the health variables and socio-economic status variables, but were unable to find any consistent patterns.

  6. However, certain types of chronic health conditions may also have a mobilising effect by activating mechanisms, such as self-interest and social identity (Gollust and Rahn 2015).

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Academy of Finland under Grant Nos. 266844 and 273433.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political and Economic Studies, University of Helsinki, P.O. Box 54, 00014, Helsinki, Finland

    Mikko Mattila & Hanna Wass

  2. Population Research Unit, Department of Social Research, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

    Hannu Lahtinen & Pekka Martikainen

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  1. Mikko Mattila
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  2. Hanna Wass
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Correspondence to Mikko Mattila.

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Mattila, M., Wass, H., Lahtinen, H. et al. Sick leave from work and the voting booth? A register-based study on health and turnout. Acta Polit 53, 429–447 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41269-017-0062-0

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