The Impact of Self-Interest on Policy Attitudes during the Pandemic

• In Event: Politics of Personal Experience

Abstract

Covid-19 is an economic crisis in addition to a public health crisis. Illness, lost jobs, reduced hours, newly-unaffordable housing, lost health insurance — these are some of the major ways in which Americans have experienced the impact of the pandemic directly. In all cases public policy can blunt the negative impact, yet a robust policy response is not pre-ordained. It depends upon the existence of political will. In this paper we measure one aspect of political will for policy change during the pandemic: public opinion. Specifically, we ask how and whether experiencing an employment, housing, or health shock affected public support for employment-, housing-, and health-supportive policies.

Our investigation is topically relevant for the current moment. It also speaks to a more fundamental question about the nature of public opinion — to what extent is it rooted in self-interest versus two long-standing attitudes in American politics: partisanship and racial resentment.

To investigate these questions we utilize a nationally-representative survey conducted in November 2020. In many ways our study is modeled after Hacker et al. (2013)’s study of the political impact of economic shocks. First we present new data on the prevalence of employment, health, and housing shocks eight months into the pandemic. Second, we test the impact of self-interest (i.e. having experienced one or more of these shocks), partisanship, and racial resentment on attitudes toward a variety of social policies that would respond to them, such as expanded unemployment insurance, new housing support, and so on. Overall, we find very little evidence that experiencing a shock influenced public opinion. Rather, racial resentment and (especially) partisanship consistently influenced Americans’ attitudes. Our results underscore how politics does not always respond to facts on the ground — even amidst the worst pandemic to hit the United States in 100 years, the severity of the crisis did not consistently produce the political will for a robust policy response.

Author

• Adam Seth Levine, Johns Hopkins University