The pandemic, which could conceivably have brought the country together, has instead contributed to our growing political divides. Partisan affiliation is often the strongest single predictor of behavior and attitudes about COVID-19, even more powerful than local infection rates or demographic characteristics, such as age and health status, as we show in our new paper, The Real Cost of Political Polarization: Evidence from the COVID-19 Pandemic. Accordingly, a state’s partisan orientation also explains its public health policies, including the timing and duration of stay-at-home orders, bans on social gathering, and mask mandates.
In the paper, we analyze survey responses from just under 50,000 U.S. adults surveyed repeatedly by Gallup from March through August, as well as publicly available policy and political data from a variety of sources.
The implications are unfortunate. Ideally, public health policy would be driven by theory and evidence, not the relative power of…
