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, two years after its previous 2019 election, rather than four years. The Liberal government’s perceived opportunity was to turn minority rule into a majority, based on their ongoing COVID-19 pandemic response and perfect incumbent success rate of recent provincial elections. Harmonizing official voting data of electoral districts to COVID data of more aggregate health regions, this is the first study to examine COVID-19 and voting in Canada, currently on the precipice of another election. Overall, COVID severity was associated with reduced voter turnout in the 2021 election, compared with 2019, as well as an increase in the Liberal vote share and a decrease in the Conservative vote share. Although these findings may have been anticipated, voters in Conservative dominant areas turned out more than voters in Liberal dominant areas, which may not have been anticipated, leading to Liberal gains well below a majority.

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.