Who Do You Trust? The Consequences of Partisanship and Trust for Public Responsiveness to COVID-19 Orders

Abstract

Non-uniform compliance with public policy by citizens can undermine the effectiveness of government, particularly during crises. Mitigation policies intended to combat the novel coronavirus offer a real-world measure of citizen compliance, allowing us to examine the determinants of asymmetrical responsiveness. Analyzing county-level cellphone data, we leverage staggered roll-out to estimate the causal effect of stay-at-home orders on mobility using a difference-in-differences strategy. We find movement is significantly curtailed, and examination of descriptive heterogeneous effects suggests the key roles that partisanship and trust play in producing irregular compliance. We find that Republican-leaning counties comply less than Democratic-leaning ones, which we argue underlines the importance of trust in science and acceptance of large-scale government policies for compliance. However, this partisan compliance gap shrinks when directives are given by Republican leaders, suggesting citizens are more trusting of co-partisan leaders. Furthermore, we find that higher levels of social trust increase compliance; yet these gains attenuate or intensify depending upon community-level partisan sentiments. Our study provides a real-world, behavioral measure that demonstrates the influence of partisanship, social trust, and their interaction on citizen welfare. Finally, we argue that our results speak to how trust in government may impact successful containment of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Covid pandemic enters the ballot box: The impact of conspiracy theories on Italians' voting behaviour during the COVID-19 crisis

“…However, the impact of conspiracy theories and anti-vaccine attitudes on intention to vote for PPs in power is less accentuated when compared with the likelihood of voting for the two PPs in the opposition. In this sense, the role played by the Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S) during the vaccination campaign may have contributed to mitigate the impact of these variables on the intention to vote for PPs (Valeriani et al, 2021; see also Goldstein and Wiedemann, 2021).…”

Political attitudes and efficacy of health expert communication on the support for COVID-19 vaccination program: Findings from a survey in Hong Kong

“…Several studies investigate the association of political attitudes and vaccine hesitancy. The partisan effect was found in studies on COVID-19 measures; many of these studies using US data found Republicans to be more vaccine-hesitant [11] , [12] , [13] . Other studies based on data in democracies found that the divide was not between the left and the right, but rather how far one was from the center, with the far-right and far-left showing more hesitancy [14] , [15] , [16] .…”

“…Other studies based on data in democracies found that the divide was not between the left and the right, but rather how far one was from the center, with the far-right and far-left showing more hesitancy [14] , [15] , [16] . A co-partisan effect has been found in which supporters follow advice from leaders of their political parties [11] . For example, a study based in Brazil found that supporters of the President strongly rejected Chinese vaccines because the President was critical of China [17] .…”

Information Source Use and Social Media Engagement: Examining their Effects on Origin of COVID-19 Beliefs

“…Democrats, the more liberal political party in the U.S., had much greater confidence that scientists would act in the best interest of the public; while Republicans', the more conservative political party, confidence remained flat (Funk et al, 2020). Partisan opinions paralleled behavioral differences: Republicans participated in social distancing practices less than Democrats (Allcott et al, 2020;Goldstein & Wiedemann, 2021;Kushner Gadarian et al, 2020;Painter & Qiu, 2021). For example, due to the politicization of mask-wearing to prevent the spread of droplets (Thacker, 2020), the acceptability of and adherence to mask-wearing varied among the U.S. population, despite evidence that masks reduced the transmission of COVID-19 (Malecki et al, 2021).…”