Partisanship, health behavior, and policy attitudes in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic

By S. Gadarian, S. Goodman, Thomas B. Pepinsky. PLoS ONE, 2020

623 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Objective To study the U.S. public’s health behaviors, attitudes, and policy opinions about COVID-19 in the earliest weeks of the national health crisis (March 20–23, 2020). Method We designed and fielded an original representative survey of 3,000 American adults between March 20–23, 2020 to collect data on a battery of 38 health-related behaviors, government policy preferences on COVID-19 response and worries about the pandemic. We test for partisan differences COVID-19 related policy attitudes and behaviors, measured in three different ways: party affiliation, intended 2020 Presidential vote, and self-placed ideological positioning. Our multivariate approach adjusts for a wide range of individual demographic and geographic characteristics that might confound the relationship between partisanship and health behaviors, attitudes, and preferences. Results We find that partisanship—measured as party identification, support for President Trump, or left-right ideological positioning—explains differences in Americans across a wide range of health behaviors and policy preferences. We find no consistent evidence that controlling for individual news consumption, the local policy environment, and local pandemic-related deaths erases the observed partisan differences in health behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes. In further analyses, we use a LASSO regression approach to select predictors, and find that a partisanship indicator is the most commonly selected predictor across the 38 dependent variables that we study. Conclusion Our analysis of individual self-reported behavior, attitudes, and policy preferences in response to COVID-19 reveals that partisanship played a central role in shaping individual responses in the earliest months of the COVID-19 pandemic. These results indicate that partisan differences in responding to a national public health emergency were entrenched from the earliest days of the pandemic.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a07f46ac853cd14102f7b4e2be76a6ebdf301fc4

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Citations in the corpus

Crisis signaling: how Italy's coronavirus lockdown affected incumbent support in other European countries (2020, neutral): “…of President Donald J. Trump and conservative media hosts, like Sean Hannity on Fox News, have produced a differential mass public health response among conservative voters who comply less with social distancing measures (Allcott et al., 2020; Bursztyn et al., 2020; Gadarian et al., 2020).”
How Affective Polarization Shapes Americans’ Political Beliefs: A Study of Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic (2020, background): “The COVID-19 pandemic has been no exception, with surveys highlighting large partisan gaps in the perceived seriousness of the crisis, actions taken in response to it, and assessments of blame for the outcome (Allcott et al. 2020; Gadarian et al. 2020).”
Politicization and Polarization in COVID-19 News Coverage (2020, background): “Several other studies corroborate that Democrats are more likely to comply with social distancing guidelines (Goldstein & Wiedemann, 2020; Kushner Gadarian et al., 2020; Painter & Qiu, 2020), while Republicans and individuals with greater faith in President Trump are less likely to do so (Graham et…”
Polarization and public health: Partisan differences in social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic (2020, background): “1 Gadarian et al. (2020), Makridis and Rothwell (2020), and Wu and Huber (2020) show that partisanship is a primary driver of attitudes about the pandemic and self-reported behaviors in surveys, and Druckman et al. (2020) show that affective polarization colors people's evaluations of the…”