The Politics of Social Distancing

• In Event: Relevance, Quality, and Expedience: Political Science Responds to COVID-19: Comparing and Explaining Policy Reactions and Political Consequences

Abstract

Since the beginning of the Covid-19 epidemic, governments across Europe and beyond have attempted to prevent the disease's spread by limiting the movements of their citizens. Much of this has been accomplished through official government lockdowns. These have restricted citizens to leaving their houses for specific reasons: grocery purchases, medical emergencies, or exercise. However, no government can perfectly monitor the movements of its citizens. Lockdowns require that people refrain from leaving their house even in the absence of legal sanction. And because lockdowns cannot be comprehensive, we see substantial variation not only across countries with different lockdown regimes, but within them in terms of how much different people engage in social distancing.

In this study we examine variation at the subnational level in social distancing across Europe. We employ data drawn from the Google Community Mobility surveys which use anonymized movement data taken from people's mobile phones. This data provides measures of activity in various locations (workplace, home, retail, etc) since the end of February 2020 for subnational geographical units across Europe and beyond.

We analyze whether the level of social distancing in these regions or localities is associated with economic, demographic, and political factors. In particular our interests are in two areas. Firstly, economic security: do regions with higher levels of homeownership, higher incomes, higher wealth, and lower unemployment have higher levels of social distancing? We find evidence that economic security does allow people to stay at, or work from, home. Secondly, political preferences. As the lockdown has dragged on, many countries are seeing some political resistance, often, though not always, from the libertarian or populist right. We show that in the UK social distancing patterns correlate strongly with the local Brexit vote and extend this analysis across European regions more generally.

Authors

• Ben William Ansell, University of Oxford

• Asli Cansunar, University of Washington

• Mads Andreas Elkjaer, University of Oxford