Democratic & Republican Disasters: SARS, H1N1, Ebola, and Zika & U.S. Politics

• In Event: Pandemic Politics, Vaccine Polities: Comparing Outbreaks, Eras, and Geographies

Abstract

Disasters are natural sites for the politics of blame, avoidance, and credit claiming. How do the politics of credit and blame for disaster management intersect with elite party politics of a very polarized country? We use key public health emergencies of 21st century America to understand the politics of elite cueing and partisanship in general and in the increasingly important case of disaster response. Just how different are the parties, what influences the signals their elites send and voters hear, and how do these signals change?

To understand partisan policy differences and elite cueing of public opinion, we analyzed previous public health crises in the United States over the past two decades: the SARS epidemic, H1N1 influenza, and Ebola and Zika outbreaks. While all were smaller and more localized events than COVID19, they shed light on different partisan responses to public health crises. For elite cueing we use statements by federal-level politicians and partisan media to identify who spoke about disasters and what they said. For public opinion we rely on archived public opinion surveys. In elite cueing and public opinion, we are particularly interested in how partisanship is related to the politicization of the public health bureaucracy, or science, in the context of each epidemic overtime. We hypothesize that partisan credit claiming and blame in each epidemic may be increasingly related to the politicization of science, in line with growing differences between the parties over time on many issues related to public health, including trust in political institutions, ethnic antagonism, and preference for magical thinking.

Differences in the ways in which partisans discuss and perceive epidemics over time are important for public health as partisan responses may or may not align with the realities of public health need or threats. This risk is overwhelmingly evident in the age of COVID-19, but will be increasingly important with the rise of emerging infectious diseases due to anthropogenic climate change.

Authors

• Charley Ellen Willison, Cornell University

• Phillip M. Singer, University of Utah