Department of Political Science, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, United States of America.
Department of Political Science, University of California, Irvine, CA, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2021 Apr 7;16(4):e0249596. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0249596. eCollection 2021.
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).
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.
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.
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.
研究美国公众在国家卫生危机的最早几周（2020 年 3 月 20 日至 23 日）对 COVID-19 的健康行为、态度和政策意见。
我们设计并在 2020 年 3 月 20 日至 23 日期间对 3000 名美国成年人进行了一项具有代表性的原始调查，以收集与 38 项与健康相关的行为、COVID-19 应对政策偏好以及对大流行的担忧有关的一系列数据。我们测试了 COVID-19 相关政策态度和行为的党派差异，以三种不同方式衡量：党派归属、2020 年总统选举意向和自我定位的意识形态。我们的多元方法调整了可能混淆党派与健康行为、态度和偏好之间关系的广泛的个人人口统计和地理特征。
我们发现，党派关系——通过党派认同、对特朗普总统的支持或左右意识形态定位来衡量——可以解释美国人在广泛的健康行为和政策偏好方面的差异。我们没有发现一致的证据表明，控制个人新闻消费、当地政策环境和与当地大流行相关的死亡人数可以消除观察到的党派在健康行为、信仰和态度方面的差异。在进一步的分析中，我们使用 LASSO 回归方法选择预测因子，并发现，在我们研究的 38 个因变量中，党派关系指标是最常被选中的预测因子。
我们对 COVID-19 反应的个人自我报告行为、态度和政策偏好的分析表明，党派关系在 COVID-19 大流行最早几个月塑造个人反应方面发挥了核心作用。这些结果表明，在国家公共卫生紧急情况下的党派差异从大流行的最早几天就根深蒂固。
