Polarization and public health: Partisan differences in social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic

By Hunt Allcott, Levi Boxell, Jacob Conway, Matthew Gentzkow, Michaela Thaler, David Yang. Journal of Public Economics, 2020

1,041 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study partisan differences in Americans' response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Political leaders and media outlets on the right and left have sent divergent messages about the severity of the crisis, which could impact the extent to which Republicans and Democrats engage in social distancing and other efforts to reduce disease transmission. We develop a simple model of a pandemic response with heterogeneous agents that clarifies the causes and consequences of heterogeneous responses. We use location data from a large sample of smartphones to show that areas with more Republicans engaged in less social distancing, controlling for other factors including public policies, population density, and local COVID cases and deaths. We then present new survey evidence of significant gaps at the individual level between Republicans and Democrats in self-reported social distancing, beliefs about personal COVID risk, and beliefs about the future severity of the pandemic.

Subfields: Communication, Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1c7a8679128272454719bb8e3a8100f9a927094a

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Citations in the corpus

The Cost of the Covid-19 Crisis: Lockdowns, Macroeconomic Expectations, and Consumer Spending (2020, neutral): “Barrios and Hochberg (2020) and Allcott et al. (2020) use internet searches, survey data, and travel data from smartphones to document that political partisanship determines the perception of risk associated with COVID19 and non-essential travel activity. Bursztyn et al. (2020) study”
Partisanship, health behavior, and policy attitudes in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic (2020, background): “Relative to existing individual-level survey research on partisanship and health behavior in the early stages of the US pandemic [28,33], our analysis covers a much wider array of policy responses and attitudes.”
Coronavirus Fears and Macroeconomic Expectations (2020, neutral): “, 2020; Barrios and Hochberg, 2020; Allcott et al., 2020). Hanspal et al. (2020) conduct a survey in April and find that younger and poorer households face larger income shocks related to the pandemic, and that households exposed to larger income losses are more likely to report plans to decrease to”
A literature review of the economics of COVID‐19 (2020, neutral): “Allcott et al. (2020) find a similar pattern.”
Spatial analysis and GIS in the study of COVID-19. A review (2020, background): “Allcott et al. (2020) analysed the relationship between the governing political party in each US county, social behaviour with respect to containment measures, and con ﬁ rmed cases of COVID-19.”
Mapping county-level mobility pattern changes in the United States in response to COVID-19 (2020, background): “It can also inform the analysis of potential influential factors on the compliance with COVID-19 social distancing orders such as self-report beliefs, social disparities, political and geographic contexts in risk communication and public-health interventions [12, 3, 18, 13].”
Designing Information Provision Experiments (2020, background): “Allcott et al. (2020), on the other hand, find no effect of incentives on partisan differences in beliefs about the coronavirus pandemic.”
Trust and compliance to public health policies in times of COVID-19 (2020, positive): “…to the crisis.22 22 This interpretation is actually related to very recent studies on political orientation in the US, showing that Democrats tend not to follow the President’s directive and exert more social distancing than Republicans (e.g. Allcott et al., 2020 or Painter and Qiu, 2020).”
Race and ethnicity, gender, and age on perceived threats and fear of COVID-19: Evidence from two national data sources (2020, neutral): “These factors include political party affiliation (Allcott et al., 2020; Jiang, Chen, Yan, Lerman, & Ferrara, 2020), nativity and citizenship (Edelman, Christian, & Mosca, 2009; Garcés-Palacio & Scarinci, 2012), U.”
Politicization and Polarization in COVID-19 News Coverage (2020, methodology): “For example, 83% of Republicans rate President Trump’s response to COVID-19 as good or excellent, whereas only 18% of Democrats do so (Van Green & Tyson, 2020).”