A Partisan Pandemic: How COVID-19 Was Primed for Polarization

Abstract

Americans who affiliate with both major political parties rapidly formed diverging attitudes about the COVID-19 pandemic. Matters of scientific concern have elicited partisan reactions in the past, but partisan divergence of opinion on those issues occurred over decades rather than months. We review evidence on factors that led to polarization of previous scientific issues in an effort to explain why reactions diverged so quickly this time around. We then use publicly available survey data to reveal that partisan reactions to the pandemic were closely associated with trust in public health institutions, that the association between partisanship and trust increased over time, and that the conflation of trust and partisanship appears to largely explain polarized reactions to COVID-19. We also investigate the hypothesis that conservative media use might explain polarization but find that the hypothesis is not supported by our data.

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