PUBLIC ATTITUDES AND BEHAVIORS ABOUT COVID-19 IN THE UNITED STATES: A CASE STUDY IN ISSUE UNDERSTANDING IN A POLARIZED POLITICAL SYSTEM

Abstract

How do citizens in a polarized political system react to an unexpected emergency like the COVID-19 pandemic and how do citizens process conflicting polarized narratives to for-mulate a public policy view of the threat of the pandemic? The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic is a health emergency unlike anything in the United States since the polio epidemic 70 years ago, but the political climate of the U.S. in the 1950’s was far more centrist and consensual than the deep divisions observed today. This paper will utilize data from a 35-year longitudinal study of Generation X young adults (now in their mid-40’s) and a three-decade time series of national U.S. surveys to examine information acquisition behaviors to understand the new threat. Our analysis of the last 35 years of Generation X finds that polarized ideological partisanship was the strongest single predictor of individual votes in the 2020 election, but that individuals with a higher level of understanding of the corona-virus were more critical of the Trump Administration’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and were more likely to vote for Bid-en than Trump. A parallel analysis of a national probability sample of U.S. adults in 2020 found the same pattern of influence from ideological partisanship, coronavirus understanding, and assessment of the Trump Administration’s handling of the pan-demic. The results indicate that knowledge and understanding can provide a critical balancing effect in an evenly divided polarized political system.