Premium
Morbid Polarization: Exposure to COVID‐19 and Partisan Disagreement about Pandemic Response
Author(s) -
Rodriguez Cristian G.,
Gadarian Shana Kushner,
Goodman Sara Wallace,
Pepinsky Thomas B.
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
political psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.419
H-Index - 95
eISSN - 1467-9221
pISSN - 0162-895X
DOI - 10.1111/pops.12810
Subject(s) - pandemic , covid-19 , polarization (electrochemistry) , welfare , divergence (linguistics) , political science , demographic economics , psychology , demography , social psychology , economics , sociology , medicine , outbreak , law , virology , disease , infectious disease (medical specialty) , chemistry , pathology , linguistics , philosophy
The COVID‐19 pandemic has affected the lives of all Americans, but the severity of the pandemic has been experienced unevenly across space and time. Some states saw sharp rises in COVID‐19 cases in early March, whereas case counts rose much later in the rest of the country. In this article, we examine the relationship between exposure to COVID‐19 and citizens' views on what type of measures are required to deal with the crises and how experience with and exposure to COVID‐19 is associated with greater partisan polarization. We find consistent evidence of partisan divergence in pandemic‐response policy preferences across the first six months of the COVID‐19 pandemic: Republicans support national control measures whereas Democrats support welfare policies, and interparty differences grow over time. We find only limited evidence that exposure or experience moderates these partisan differences. Our findings are consistent with the view that Americans interpret the COVID‐19 pandemic in fundamentally partisan manner, and that objective pandemic conditions play at most a minor role in shaping mass preferences.