Many U.S. elections provide voters with precious little information about candidates on the ballot. In local contests, party labels are often absent. In primary elections, party labels are not useful. Indeed, much of the time, voters have only the name of the candidate to go by. In these contexts, how do voters make decisions? Using several experiments, we find that voters use candidates’ race, ethnicity, and gender as cues for whom to support—penalizing candidates of color and benefiting women. But we also demonstrate that providing even a small amount of information to voters—such as candidate occupation—virtually erases the effects of candidate demographics on voter behavior, even among voters with high levels of racial and gender prejudice.

Abstract: A wide range of empirical scholarship has documented a partisan gap in health behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, but the political foundations and temporal dynamics of these partisan gaps remain poorly understood. Using an original six-wave individual panel study (n = 3,000) of Americans throughout the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, we show that at the individual level, partisan differences in health behavior grew rapidly in the early months of the pandemic and are explained almost entirely by individual support for or opposition to President Trump. Our results comprise powerful evidence that Trump support (or opposition), rather than ideology or simple partisan identity, explains partisan gaps in health behavior in the United States. In a time of populist resurgence around the world, public health efforts must consider the impact of charismatic authority in addition to entrenched partisanship.

Abstract: Travel bans were a globally prevalent policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In the United States, travel bans against China and European countries proved a broadly popular mitigation tool among Americans. Why did Americans support COVID-19 travel bans? We fielded two novel survey experiments, surveying 3000 American citizens across five waves (between March 2020 and March 2021). In randomizing the country of origin of those potentially subject to travel ban measures, we find consistent evidence that racial attitudes drive support for travel bans. The strength of this relationship varies across political parties and across hypothetical target countries but is not explained by objective caseloads that change across countries and over the course of the pandemic.

The partisan politics and polarized messaging surrounding COVID-19 have attracted wide interest. We present the findings of a novel survey experiment, fielded March 21-23, 2020, on a nationally-representative sample of Americans. We found no statistically significant effects of partisan endorsements or messaging from President Trump on a wide range of health behaviors and policy attitudes. We speculate on potential explanations for these null results, such as America’s saturated media environment or heterogeneous effects by party. Our results suggest that priming experiments face serious obstacles when implemented at the same time as a national crisis is unfolding.

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.

Policy Points Mass vaccination is essential for bringing the COVID-19 pandemic to a close, yet substantial disparities remain between whites and racial and ethnic minorities within the United States. Online messaging campaigns featuring expert endorsements are a low-cost way to increase vaccine awareness among minoritized populations, yet the efficacy of same-race/ethnicity expert messaging in increasing uptake remains unknown. Our preregistered analysis of an online vaccine endorsement campaign, which randomly varied the racial/ethnic identity of the expert, revealed no evidence that information from same race/ethnicity experts affected vaccine interest or the intention to vaccinate. Our results do not rule out the possibility that other low-cost endorsement campaigns may be more effective in increasing vaccine uptake, but do suggest that public health campaigns might profitably focus on issues of access and convenience when targeting minoritized populations in the United States.

Context

The COVID-19 pandemic in the United States has been unequally experienced across racial and ethnic groups. Mass vaccination is the most effective way to bring the pandemic to an end and to manage its public health consequences. But the racialization of public health delivery in the United States has produced a sizable racial/ethnic gap in vaccination rates. Closing this gap in vaccine uptake is therefore essential to ending the pandemic.

Methods

We conducted a preregistered, well-powered (N = 2,117) between-subjects survey experiment, fielded March 24 to April 5, 2021, in which participants from YouGov's online panel-including oversamples of Black (n = 471), Hispanic/Latino/a (n = 430), and Asian American (n = 319) participants-were randomly assigned to see COVID-19 vaccine information endorsed by same- or different-race/ethnicity experts or to a control condition. We then measured respondents' vaccination intentions, intention to encourage others to get vaccinated, and interest in learning more information and sharing information with others.

Findings

Same-race/ethnicity expert endorsements had no measurable effect on nonwhite or white respondents' willingness to get the COVID-19 vaccine, to encourage others to get the vaccine, or to learn more or share information with others.

Conclusions

Our study provides empirical evidence suggesting online endorsements from same-race/ethnicity experts do not increase vaccine interest, advocacy, or uptake, though same-race/ethnicity endorsements may be effective in other venues or mediums.

Several studies demonstrate gender and partisan differences among Americans in COVID-19 socioeconomic consequences, attitudes, and behaviors. The authors of this study use six waves of panel survey data to explore the intersection of gender and party across COVID-19 mitigation behaviors, concerns, and policy preferences. The authors observe small gender gaps on several measures; however, partisan differences are larger than gender differences when considering the interaction between gender and partisanship. Democratic women are more similar to Democratic men on these measures than to Republican women. On virtually all measures, Republican women report lower levels of mitigation behaviors, worries, and support for expansive government policies compared to Democratic women and men. Analyzing the interaction of gender and partisanship illuminates how individuals navigated the pandemic with respect to identity factors that often pull in different directions. These findings suggest that one's partisan identity is more consequential than gender when it comes to COVID behaviors, concerns, and policy preferences.

Objective

To study the U.S. public's health behaviors, attitudes, and policy opinions about COVID-19 in the earliest weeks of the national health crisis (March 20-23, 2020).

Method

We designed and fielded an original representative survey of 3,000 American adults between March 20-23, 2020 to collect data on a battery of 38 health-related behaviors, government policy preferences on COVID-19 response and worries about the pandemic. We test for partisan differences COVID-19 related policy attitudes and behaviors, measured in three different ways: party affiliation, intended 2020 Presidential vote, and self-placed ideological positioning. Our multivariate approach adjusts for a wide range of individual demographic and geographic characteristics that might confound the relationship between partisanship and health behaviors, attitudes, and preferences.

Results

We find that partisanship-measured as party identification, support for President Trump, or left-right ideological positioning-explains differences in Americans across a wide range of health behaviors and policy preferences. We find no consistent evidence that controlling for individual news consumption, the local policy environment, and local pandemic-related deaths erases the observed partisan differences in health behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes. In further analyses, we use a LASSO regression approach to select predictors, and find that a partisanship indicator is the most commonly selected predictor across the 38 dependent variables that we study.

Conclusion

Our analysis of individual self-reported behavior, attitudes, and policy preferences in response to COVID-19 reveals that partisanship played a central role in shaping individual responses in the earliest months of the COVID-19 pandemic. These results indicate that partisan differences in responding to a national public health emergency were entrenched from the earliest days of the pandemic.