Anderson Frey (Rochester) will present his talk, "The Value of Experience During Crises: Evidence from COVID vaccinations." Paper is attached.
Abstract: Politicians often use previous office experience as a campaign appeal, and voters seem to value it. Nevertheless, the role of political experience in determining the quality of policies remains overlooked by the literature, particularly during times of crisis when experience becomes uniquely salient to voters. Using data on COVID vaccinations across Brazilian municipalities in 2021, this article examines how experience affects policy implementation during a crisis. It shows that vaccination rates were 11% higher in cities governed by incumbent mayors that were reelected in Nov 2020, and therefore had extensive experience fighting COVID, when compared to cities that elected newcomers. These effects are due to neither bureaucratic turnover nor differential reelection incentives. They are also concentrated in localities that were heavily hit by the pandemic earlier in 2020, consistent with the narrative that, through learning by doing, the early administrative experiences of mayors determined their policy performance when the vaccines arrived.