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 engage 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.

Income, Liquidity, and the Consumption Response to the 2020 Economic Stimulus Payments

“…Jones, Philippon and Venkateswaran (2020), Barro, Ursua and Weng (2020), Eichenbaum, Rebelo and Trabandt (2020), and Kaplan, Moll and Violante (2020). Gormsen and Koijen (2020) Barrios and Hochberg (2020) and Allcott, Boxell, Conway, Gentzkow, Thaler and Yang (2020) show that political affiliations impact the social distancing response to the pandemic, and Coven and Gupta (2020) study disparities in COVID-19 infections and responses.…”

Labor Markets During the COVID-19 Crisis: A Preliminary View

“…In a survey experiment on a U.S. population, they find survey participants vastly overestimate the mortality rate and extent of contagion. Barrios and Hochberg (2020) and Allcott et al (2020) use internet searches, survey data, and travel data from smartphones to document that political partisanship determines the perception of risk associated with covid-19 and non-essential travel activity. Dingel and Neiman (2020) use data from responses to two Occupational Information Network surveys and estimate that about 37% of jobs can be performed from home, whereas Mongey (2020) documents that employees that are less likely to be able to work from home are mainly non-white and without a college degree.…”

The Relationship between In-Person Voting and COVID-19: Evidence from the Wisconsin Primary

“…Our strategy is very similar to other economics papers which examine associations between the virus and various social factors (e.g. Allcott, Boxell, Conway, Gentzkow, Thaler, and Yang, 2020;Bursztyn, Rao, Roth, and Yanagizawa-Drott, 2020;Courtemanche, Garuccio, Le, Pinkston, and Yelowitz, 2020a,b;Dave, Friedson, Matsuzawa, McNichols, and Sabia, 2020;Mangrum and Niekamp, 2020).…”

“…Due to the political nature of the decision in switching to absentee voting (vote-by-mail), this work also relates to an emerging economics literature suggesting that political beliefs and actions may impact the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Allcott et al (2020) uses cellphone location data from Safegraph to suggest that areas with higher Republican vote share in the 2016 presidential election engaged in less social distancing than areas with higher Democratic vote share in the 2016 presidential election. Relatedly, Adolph, Amano, Bang-Jensen, Fullman, and Wilkerson (2020) also analyze differing social distancing policy responses for COVID-19 based on the politics of the local government(s).…”