Partisanship, health behavior, and policy attitudes in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic

• Published in: PloS one Vol. 16; no. 4; p. e0249596
• Main Authors: Gadarian, Shana Kushner, Goodman, Sara Wallace, Pepinsky, Thomas B
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Public Library of Science 07-04-2021; Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subjects: Adult; Attitudes; Biology and Life Sciences; Colleges & universities; Concept formation; Consent; Coronaviruses; COVID-19; COVID-19 - epidemiology; COVID-19 - prevention & control; Disease control; Editing; Epidemics; Federal government; Female; Health aspects; Health Behavior; Humans; Male; Medicine and Health Sciences; Methodology; Pandemics; Pandemics - prevention & control; Partisanship; Party affiliation; Polarization; Policy; Political aspects; Political leadership; Political parties; Political science; Politics; Polls & surveys; Presidents; Public Health; Public opinion; Public opinion research; Public policy; Reviews; SARS-CoV-2; Social aspects; Social distancing; Social Sciences; United States; United States - epidemiology; Viral diseases; United States; United States > US; California
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0249596

To study the U.S. public's health behaviors, attitudes, and policy opinions about COVID-19 in the earliest weeks of the national health crisis (March 20-23, 2020).
We designed and fielded an original representative survey of 3,000 American adults between March 20-23, 2020 to collect data on a battery of 38 health-related behaviors, government policy preferences on COVID-19 response and worries about the pandemic. We test for partisan differences COVID-19 related policy attitudes and behaviors, measured in three different ways: party affiliation, intended 2020 Presidential vote, and self-placed ideological positioning. Our multivariate approach adjusts for a wide range of individual demographic and geographic characteristics that might confound the relationship between partisanship and health behaviors, attitudes, and preferences.
We find that partisanship-measured as party identification, support for President Trump, or left-right ideological positioning-explains differences in Americans across a wide range of health behaviors and policy preferences. We find no consistent evidence that controlling for individual news consumption, the local policy environment, and local pandemic-related deaths erases the observed partisan differences in health behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes. In further analyses, we use a LASSO regression approach to select predictors, and find that a partisanship indicator is the most commonly selected predictor across the 38 dependent variables that we study.
Our analysis of individual self-reported behavior, attitudes, and policy preferences in response to COVID-19 reveals that partisanship played a central role in shaping individual responses in the earliest months of the COVID-19 pandemic. These results indicate that partisan differences in responding to a national public health emergency were entrenched from the earliest days of the pandemic.