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

Abstract

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.

Keywords: Coronavirus; Health behaviors; Media trust; Political polarization.

Fig. 1

Partisan differences in perceived risk and social distancing. Note: Figure shows responses to nationally representative polls by political affiliation. Panel A shows the share of people concerned about coronavirus spreading to the United States (Piacenza, 2020). Panel B shows self-reported behavior change as of March 13–14 (Marist, 2020). Panel C shows the share of people avoiding public places, such as stores and restaurants (Saad, 2020). Panel D shows that share of people avoiding small gatherings, such as with friends and family (Saad, 2020).

Fig. 2

Geographic variation in social distancing, partisanship, COVID-19, and public policy. Note: Figure shows the U.S. geographic distribution of social distancing, political affiliation, COVID-19, and public policy responses. Panel A shows, for each county, the percent change in aggregate visits between the week beginning January 27, 2020 and the week beginning April 6, 2020. Blue shading denotes a more negative percent change in visits during the latter week relative to the former. Red shading indicates an increase or a smaller decrease in visits. These visits are sourced from SafeGraph's mobile device location data. Panel B maps counties by the Republican presidential vote shares in the 2016 election. Red shading in this panel indicates more Republican counties, and blue shading indicates more Democratic counties. Panel C shows for each county the number of COVID-19 cases confirmed by July 12, 2020 (sourced from The New York Times). Panel D shades US counties by the effective start date for the earliest “stay-at-home” order issued (see Section 3 for sources). Blue shading indicates an earlier order, while red shading indicates that an order was issued later or was never issued. (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)

Fig. 3

Social distancing and COVID-19 incidence. Note: Panel A shows the number of visits (normalized to one) to SafeGraph POIs for each week since January 27, 2020 for Republican counties and Democratic counties separately. Panel B is analogous but plots cumulative, end-of-week values for confirmed COVID-19 cases (per 100,000 people) and confirmed COVID-19 deaths (per 1,000,000 people). Republican counties are defined to be those whose 2016 Republican vote share is greater than the median vote share (66.4%) across the counties in our sample. Counties covering New York City, Kansas City, and Alaska are excluded from these counts, as noted in Appendix A.1.1.

Fig. 4

Partisan differences in social distancing. Note: Figure shows the estimated coefficients for county Republican vote share ρ_i on the log number of POI visits in the county. For Panel A, only county and time fixed effects are included as controls. Panel B is the same as Panel A except state-time fixed effects replace the time fixed effects. Panel C is the same as Panel B except that health, economic, and weather covariates are included (flexibly), as described in the main text. The grey error bars indicate 95% confidence intervals constructed using standard errors clustered at the state-level.

Fig. 5

Partisan differences in beliefs and actions. Note: Figure shows coefficient plots from regressing normalized measures of beliefs and actions on our seven-point measure of partisan affiliation which ranges between 0 (Strongly Democratic) and 1 (Strongly Republican). Negative estimates indicate less concern about COVID-19 or social distancing. Demographic controls are age, race, income, education, number of children, log population at the ZIP code level, county-level deaths and cases, and state fixed effects. 2% of observations are set to the mean due to an invalid ZIP code. Self-reported social distancing is the percent reduction in contact with others over one month; effectiveness of distancing is the estimated likelihood of catching COVID-19 in one month without social distancing; importance of distancing vs. economy is subjects' perception of whether it is more important to go out and stimulate the economy versus staying in and preventing the spread of COVID-19; predicted cases are predictions about the number of new COVID-19 cases in the US in April; incentivized subjects restrict to the subsample whose answers are incentivized. Observations are weighted to mimic a representative sample as described in the text. Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals.