Vaccines, GMOs, and Climate Change: Partisanship and Public Opinion of Science

• In Event: Public Perceptions and Health Communication

Abstract

For almost three decades, in the United States and throughout the world, controversy has raged over the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and bioengineered foods (Weasel 2008). While opposition to GMOs has been intense and widespread, previous studies have not found opinion to be strongly polarized along partisan lines (Pew Research 2016). In contrast, controversy regarding COVID-19 vaccination policies has rapidly emerged as a highly partisan and politically charged issue. Both issues, of course, implicate broader debates about views of nature, trust in science, and confidence in government actors and regulatory institutions. In this paper, we hypothesize that politics matters when it comes to the nature of opinion about science and health policy issues. We explore two sets of questions: First, what does the contemporary configuration of American public opinion look like when it comes to issues of GMOs and vaccinations? How does the public understand GMOs, and to what extent is opinion on bioengineered food related to views other science and health-related issues, such as vaccinations and climate change? Second, we explore whether there are potential spillover effects of polarization across scientific issue domains. Drawing on data from an original module of the 2022 Cooperative Election Study (CES), we investigate whether the salience of the politically charged, highly polarized issue of COVID-19 vaccination has the potential to prime public opinion about GMOs. Conducted in the fall of 2022 with a nationally representative sample of more than 50,000 respondents (fewer, of course, for module-specific questions) the CES is extremely well-suited for exploring these questions. In additional to asking about a range of science and health-related issues, we employ an order experiment, varying the presentation of survey questions to test hypotheses about partisanship and issue salience for questions of GMO opinion, childhood vaccinations, COVID-19 policies, and opinions on climate change. We hypothesize that presenting the issue of COVID-19 vaccinations first, thereby bringing to mind a highly partisan science controversy, will serve to prime party identification, strengthening connections between partisanship and opinion on GMOs. We expect that the priming effects of the COVID-19 vaccination controversy on GMO opinion will be stronger for Republicans than Democrats. Additionally, we anticipate that, controlling for party identification and other variables, greater trust in science and in public regulatory institutions will be associated with greater support for the use of vaccinations and for GMO foods. Understanding how partisanship, issue salience, and trust in scientific interact in the context of politicized scientific issues is essential for understanding not only the issues of GMOs and vaccinations, but the nature of public opinion when it comes to issues of science and health in American politics.

Authors

• Paul B. Freedman, University of Virginia

• Emily Gregory, University of Virginia