Risk Perception Through the Lens of Politics in the Time of the COVID-19 Pandemic

By John Manuel Barrios, Yael V. Hochberg. Social Science Research Network, 2020

409 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Even when N objectively speaking N death is on the line, partisan bias still colors beliefs about facts. We use data on internet searches as well as proprietary data on county-level average daily travel distance and visits to non-essential businesses from a large sample of U.S. smartphones at the daily level and show that the higher the percentage of Trump voters in a county, holding all else equal, the lower the perception of risk associated with the COVID-19 virus and the lower the level of social distancing behavior exhibited. As Trump vote share rises, individuals search less for information on the virus, they search less for information about unemployment benefits, and they exhibit lower reductions in both their daily distance traveled and their visits to non-essential businesses. Risk perceptions in areas with high Trump vote shares increase in these areas only after 3/9/20, when it was announced that COVID-19 had struck the Conservative Political Action Committee meetings and conservative politicians were self-quarantined, suggesting that their risk perceptions are affected not by changes in fundamental underlying risk, but rather by political-related interpretations of the risk. These patterns persist even in the face of state-level mandates to close schools and non-essential businesses and to Ostay home-work safe,O and reverse only when the White House releases federal social distancing guidelines on March 16th. This differential is present even in the face of similar levels of ability to telework and in the presence of higher levels of older population at risk. Our results suggest that political partisanship may play a role in determining risk perceptions in a pandemic, with potentially significant externalities for public health outcomes. Relying solely on compliance with voluntary suggested measures in the presence of different political views on the crisis may have limited effectiveness; instead, enforcement may be required to successfully flatten the curve.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Modeling and Simulation, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2809360e77c422039b50af78094d5eb3a2b273fe

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Citations in the corpus

“Rugged individualism” and collective (in)action during the COVID-19 pandemic (2020, background): “While individualism and civic culture are not necessarily at odds, we show that TFE (and, by implication, rugged individualism) indeed has a negative association with civic culture (proxied by voter turnout as in Barrios et al., 2020).”
How personality and policy predict pandemic behavior: Understanding sheltering-in-place in 55 countries at the onset of COVID-19. (2020, background): “…disproportionately more likely to acknowledge the severity of the situation (Allcott et al., in press; Gadarian, Goodman, & Pepinsky, 2020), search for COVID-related information (Barrios & Hochberg, 2020), support drastic policies (van Holm, Monaghan, Shahar, Messina, & Surprenant, 2020), Figure 1.”
Poverty and economic dislocation reduce compliance with COVID-19 shelter-in-place protocols (2020, neutral): “, 2020; Painter and Qiu, 2020; Barrios and Hochberg, 2020; Brzezinski et al., 2020 ), our model suggests that partisan media viewership will reduce compliance with shelter-in-place policies ( Proposition 2 ). President Trump’s supporters are more skeptical of mainstream media and federal government ”
Labor Markets During the COVID-19 Crisis: A Preliminary View (2020, neutral): “benefits of different economic policies (Atkeson (2020), Barro et al. (2020), Eichenbaum et al. (2020), Guerrieri et al. (2020), Alvarez et al.”
Income, Liquidity, and the Consumption Response to the 2020 Economic Stimulus Payments (2020, neutral): “Barrios and Hochberg (2020) and Allcott, Boxell, Conway, Gentzkow, Thaler and Yang (2020) show that political affiliations impact the social distancing response to the 5 pandemic, and Coven and Gupta (2020) study disparities in COVID-19 infections and responses.”
Polarization and public health: Partisan differences in social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic (2020, background): “Barrios and Hochberg (2020) show differences between Republican and Democratic areas in the frequency of COVID-related queries on Google and in movement patterns as measured in GPS data from a different source than the one we use.”
Did the paycheck protection program hit the target? (2020, methodology): “The argument in Barrios et al. (2020) that firm payroll closely predicted PPP loan receipt accords with this view.”
The Persuasive Effect of Fox News: Non-Compliance with Social Distancing During the Covid-19 Pandemic (2020, background): “Several studies have looked at differences associated with political partisanship, such as the correlation between perceptions of risk, Trump support and social distancing (Barrios and Hochberg, 2020; Allcott et al., 2020), beliefs associated with support for the Republican versus Democratic party (”
The Cost of the Covid-19 Crisis: Lockdowns, Macroeconomic Expectations, and Consumer Spending (2020, positive): “We take the timing of lockdowns at the county level from Baek et al. (2020) and the time series of confirmed COVID infections from Barrios and Hochberg (2020).”