Pandemic politics: Exploring the intersection of state political affiliation and public universities' COVID-19 policies and messaging

Abstract

As coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) spread within the United States, the challenge of responding to a large-scale health crisis was compounded as the federal government struggled to deliver a unified response. Decision-making powers for pandemic protocols were passed to individual states, whose responses were heavily influenced by their administrations' partisan political leanings. This study explores differences in the transparency of COVID-19 information on university websites and the restrictiveness of the measures they implemented by examining university messaging in all-Republican and all-Democrat controlled states. This study employs a quantitative content analysis of a census of websites (N = 265) from public universities located in states with government trifectas. The data reveal that masking, vaccination, and testing measures were significantly more restrictive among universities located in Democratic trifectas than in Republican trifectas. Additionally, universities in Democratic trifectas communicated more transparently, such that they were more likely to have a direct link to COVID-19 information on their homepages. The results indicate that universities in states where a single political party holds power implemented COVID-19 protocols that reflected the political -viewpoints on the health and economic responses to the pandemic. This finding offers important evidence that both governments and public universities based their public health decisions on political factors.