Awareness of COVID-19 at the Local Level: Political Causes and Consequences

• In Event: Public Perceptions of and Government Responses to Health Crises

Abstract

While the COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound effect on the lives of virtually all Americans, these effects have not been evenly distributed across the country. At any given time since it first began to spread in the United States, the severity of the pandemic has varied widely by region. At times, some communities have faced the grim spectacle of total lockdowns, overwhelmed hospitals, and refrigerated morgue trucks, even as life continued relatively normally in others. While some of the economic, social, and political impacts of the disease have been national in scope, the most disruptive and severe effects have been localized: spikes in infection rates, hospitalizations, and deaths; state and local lockdown orders and mandatory masking ordinances; and localized business closures and layoffs, to name a few. These localized outbreaks, and the policy responses to them, may have profound political consequences.

In order for localized outbreaks to affect politics, however, the public must be aware of them. How responsive are these perceptions to actual variations in cases, hospitalizations, and deaths in an individual’s community or region? How does this responsiveness vary across dimensions like education, news consumption habits, political knowledge, ideology, and partisanship? How do these perceptions, in turn, shape political attitudes and behavior, such as approval of elected officials, opinions about COVID-19 related policies, voter turnout, and vote choice?

To answer these questions, we have embedded a question in a 1000-respondent module on the 2020 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES). This question captures respondents’ perception of whether the level of infections in their county is above, below, or in line with the national average. We are able to pair these responses with the CCES rich “Common Content” battery of political and demographic questions, as well as voter-file-validated turnout (a standard feature of the CCES since 2014). We will also use geographic identifiers to match each respondent to real county-level COVID-19 data from the Coronavirus Resource Center at Johns Hopkins University.

This will allow us to examine the responsiveness of respondents’ relative perceptions of the pandemic to actual current trends at the time of the survey, as well as the political and demographic predictors of that responsiveness. We will then model the relationship between these perceptions and a series of political dependent variables: approval of President Trump and other elected officials, validated voter turnout, reported vote choice (in federal, state, and local races as applicable), and support or opposition to pandemic-related policy measures such as school closures and mask ordinances (using an original battery of questions we have added to the module).

In the wake of the 2020 election, we can expect a great deal of theorizing about the pandemic’s political impact by both scholars and laypeople. This study will make an important contribution to this discussion by exploring an oft-overlooked mediating step in the causal chain between virus outbreaks and political outcomes: an individual’s awareness and perception of what is happening around them.

Authors

• Jake Haselswerdt, University of Missouri

• Sarah E. Gollust, University of Minnesota