Category: Current Affairs

I recently shared some results on the partisan politics of COVID-19 from a new working paper on public health behaviors and attitudes in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

A common question in response is to ask about how geography interacts with health behavior. COVID-19 cases are not randomly distributed across America, and neither is partisanship. These are plausibly related to both the urban/rural divide in American politics, as well as to big social and political differences across states.

Our argument, though, is that partisanship dominates everything. Here is a way to show this. I have combined data as of March 23 on COVID-19 cases by state (from here) and by county (from here) and matched it to our survey respondents’ ZIP codes. I then estimated a new type of statistical model—a multilevel logistic regression model—that includes individual demographics, ZIP-code level measures of how rural the respondent’s place of residence is, county-level COVID-19 diagnoses, and state-level COVID-19 diagnoses, along with state-level random effects to model unobserved differences across states, all as predictors. If we plot the odds-ratios combine Democrats to Republicans and case loads at natural breaks in the distribution of cases by state and county (with other predictors in the model but not plotted to avoid too many results), here’s what we get.

As it turns out, our results for partisanship never change. And also as it turns out, state-level diagnoses don’t seem to matter very much, whereas county-level diagnoses do seem to matter a bit. Once again, it seems that partisanship dominates. We also get very weak results in this framework for how rural the respondent’s ZIP code is.

There will be more to explore in the coming weeks; we suspect that partisan differences will decline over time and that geographic ones will become more important. But that’s just a hypothesis, and it’s one that we’ll have to test.

This image is from a new working paper (draft to come soon, joint with Shana Gadarian and Sara Goodman) on the partisan politics of the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic in the United States.

Many of us have seen the survey “top-lines” comparing Americans’ views of COVID-19 and focusing on partisan differences. What these simple comparisons don’t tell us, though, are whether or not these differences persist when we account for demographic or geographic factors. And we might wonder how representative the surveyed populations are, or whether these differences are the result of data-mining across a wide range of different survey responses.

Our analysis, by contrast, is a pre-registered, IRB-approved analysis of the partisan politics of COVID-19. The figure above adjusts flexibly for a wide range of demographic and geographic differences, and adopts a very conservative Bonferroni correction to adjust for multiple comparisons.

In our other analysis, we adopt a regularized regression approach to sifting through our wide range of predictors of health attitudes and behaviors, and find that respondents’ partisan affiliations are the most commonly selected predictor of health behaviors, attitudes, and policy preferences. Partisanship is more consistently predictive than education, news consumption, income, or anything else.

That the politics of COVID-19 are partisan is perhaps not surprising given the condition of American politics, but that mass public health behavior is more consistently predicted by partisanship than by anything else we measured has profound and distressing implications for public health in the coming months.