Scared into Action: How Partisanship and Fear are Associated with Reactions to Public Health Directives
This research tackles the problem of partisan resistance to public health measures, offering insights for policymakers to improve communication strategies during crises, though it is incremental in building on existing findings about ideology and behavior.
The study addressed the contradiction that conservatives, despite being typically rule-abiding, adhered less to COVID-19 health directives, finding that conservatives' adherence increased when they expressed more fear of the virus. It used press releases, Twitter data, and mobility data to show that government communications and case numbers boosted fear expressions.
Differences in political ideology are increasingly appearing as an impediment to successful bipartisan communication from local leadership. For example, recent empirical findings have shown that conservatives are less likely to adhere to COVID-19 health directives. This behavior is in direct contradiction to past research which indicates that conservatives are more rule abiding, prefer to avoid loss, and are more prevention-motivated than liberals. We reconcile this disconnect between recent empirical findings and past research by using insights gathered from press releases, millions of tweets, and mobility data capturing local movement in retail, grocery, workplace, parks, and transit domains during COVID-19 shelter-in-place orders. We find that conservatives adhere to health directives when they express more fear of the virus. In order to better understand this phenomenon, we analyze both official and citizen communications and find that press releases from local and federal government, along with the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases, lead to an increase in expressions of fear on Twitter.