In a new working paper (PDF), Shana Gadarian, Sara Goodman, and I think carefully about the partisan politics of COVID-19. The 10 second pitch? Trumpism explains the data on prosocial health behaviors much better than does partisanship or ideology.

For reasons that are not clear to me, SSRN has declared that this paper requires special oversight, and has spent the past six days confirming some feature using information that I provided to them late last week. Happily, this is my blog, and I can host what I like. And I like this paper.

Here’s the abstract:

A wide range of empirical scholarship has documented a partisan gap in health behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, but the political foundations and temporal dynamics of these partisan gaps remain poorly understood. Using an original six-wave individual panel study of Americans throughout the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, we find that at the individual level, partisan differences in health behavior grew rapidly in the early months of the pandemic, and are explained almost entirely by individual support for or opposition to President Trump. Our results comprise powerful evidence that Trumpism, rather than ideology or simple partisan identity, explains partisan gaps in health behavior in the United States.

One of the dangers of delegating authority of managing preprints to sites such as SSRN is that they become so bureaucratic as to become unworkable. SocArXiv is an alternative that I might explore for future papers. Or maybe the new APSA preprints server.