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. 2022 Feb 26:10.1111/pops.12810.
doi: 10.1111/pops.12810. Online ahead of print.

Morbid Polarization: Exposure to COVID-19 and Partisan Disagreement about Pandemic Response

Cristian G Rodriguez  1   2 , Shana Kushner Gadarian  3 , Sara Wallace Goodman  1 , Thomas B Pepinsky  4
Affiliations

Morbid Polarization: Exposure to COVID-19 and Partisan Disagreement about Pandemic Response

Cristian G Rodriguez et al. Polit Psychol. .

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the lives of all Americans, but the severity of the pandemic has been experienced unevenly across space and time. Some states saw sharp rises in COVID-19 cases in early March, whereas case counts rose much later in the rest of the country. In this article, we examine the relationship between exposure to COVID-19 and citizens' views on what type of measures are required to deal with the crises and how experience with and exposure to COVID-19 is associated with greater partisan polarization. We find consistent evidence of partisan divergence in pandemic-response policy preferences across the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic: Republicans support national control measures whereas Democrats support welfare policies, and interparty differences grow over time. We find only limited evidence that exposure or experience moderates these partisan differences. Our findings are consistent with the view that Americans interpret the COVID-19 pandemic in fundamentally partisan manner, and that objective pandemic conditions play at most a minor role in shaping mass preferences.

Keywords: COVID‐19; pandemic policies; partisanship; polarization; risk avoidance; terror management.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Visual representation of the hypotheses. The Y‐axis represents the support for policies typically endorsed by Democrats.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Predicted values for welfare policies by party, exposure, and waves.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Predicted values for National Control policies by party, exposure, and waves.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Predicted values for extreme measures by party, exposure, and waves.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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