Risk Perception and Politics in the Time of COVID-19

Since the purpose of social distancing is to reduce the spread of a virus, in this case COVID-19, it matters greatly whether people believe in the need to take such precautions. If people infer lower risk from the same set of facts (e.g., population density, case counts and deaths), they may impose unnecessary health risks on others. Given the political divide in the US and how individuals consume news and information, the authors of this new research examine whether political partisanship affects the risk perceptions of individuals during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic of 2020.

The authors use a number of measures to explore the effects of political partisanship on pandemic risk perceptions and, among other revealing insights (regarding, for example, pandemic-related internet searches), they find that while a higher incidence of confirmed COVID-19 cases results in a reduction in daily distance traveled, this effect is muted in counties that favored Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. For example, with a doubling of the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in a county, the percent change in average daily change in distance traveled falls by 4.75 percentage points. However, for this same doubling in cases in a county, a one standard deviation increase in Trump voter share mutes this effect by 0.5 percentage points. Similar patterns are revealed when the authors examine the change in daily visits to non-essential businesses—residents in counties that favored Trump took more non-essential trips.