This paper investigates the effect of unemployment on voter turnout in Canadian federal elections, using both cross-sectional and quasi-experimental approaches. The analysis explores how unemployment, as a form of personal economic hardship, affects individuals’ likelihood of voting. Using the timing of unemployment relative to Election Day as a quasi-random assignment and employing data from Canadian Labour Force Survey, I find that unemployment has a positive effect on voter participation, especially evident in the 2021 election during the COVID-19 pandemic. Individuals who became unemployed just before the election were mobilized to express their dissatisfaction by turning out to vote.

Canada’s 2021 federal election was called early, less than two years after its previous election, and during the COVID-19 pandemic. This was the earliest called election in the fixed date era and additionally served as an unofficial referendum of the incumbent party’s pandemic response. How might that relate to voter turnout and party vote shares? Harmonizing electoral districts of official voting data to the more aggregate health regions of COVID data, this is the first study to comprehensively examine COVID severity and voting for Canada. Overall, local COVID severity was negatively associated with voter turnout in the 2021 election. Local COVID severity was also positively associated with Liberal, NDP, and Green party vote shares and negatively associated with Conservative, BQ, and People’s party vote shares. Conversely, local voter turnout was slightly higher when moving from COVID-induced to more COVID-reduced partisanship, as well as from Liberal to more Conservative partisanship.

Scholarly literature establishes a link between voter turnout and unemployment, but unemployment has mostly been used as a sign showing the health of the general economy. When thinking about personal choice in voting participation, unemployment matters more when people want to take certain actions. The public may not care much about the general economy, but they tend to express grievance when facing personal hardship. This paper focuses on analyzing individuals’ choices in voting participation, and if they turn out, how does their economic hardship influence party choice. Using individual-level data from Canadian federal elections spanning the period of 2015 - 2021, this paper finds that unemployed people are less likely to vote; however, if they turn out, they tend to locate themselves ideologically to the left.