Seven years of studying the associations between political polarization and problematic information: a literature review.

This literature review examines the intersection between political polarization and problematic information, two phenomena prominent in recent events like the 2016 Trump election and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. We analyzed 68 studies out of over 7,000 records using quantitative and qualitative methods. Our review revealed a lack of research on the relationship between political polarization and problematic information and a shortage of theoretical consideration of these phenomena. Additionally, US samples and Twitter and Facebook were frequently analyzed. The review also found that surveys and experiments were commonly used, with polarization significantly predicting problematic information consumption and sharing.

It Didn't Go Away: The Political and Social Determinants of COVID-19 Mortality Rates across Counties in the United States

Research over the last several years has demonstrated a wide variety of inequalities in the COVID-19 pandemic by socio-demographic characteristics, place, and political and religious ideology. In this study, by combining several county-level data sources, we examine how the social conditions of counties across the United States relate to their differential COVID-19 mortality rates. We find that percent Black, percent Hispanic, and income inequality are all positively related to higher mortality rates at the county level. Moreover, the percentage of the population that voted for Trump in the 2020 election was a significant and substantively large predictor of higher mortality rates. We also include healthcare-related variables, but compared to the social circumstances of the pandemic, these effects are relatively small. These results indicate that the social conditions of areas are strong predictors of how counties have experienced the pandemic and where the greatest loss of life has occurred. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of COVID is the property of MDPI and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Tribalism and Compassion in the Age of a Pandemic

This essay draws on resources in philosophy, psychology, and related social sciences—specifically, works by Joshua Greene, Jonathan Haidt, George Lakoff, and Martha Nussbaum—to analyze the moral and political dimensions of the recent polarization in the United States related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Three questions are addressed: (a) What psychological factors may have contributed to this polarization? (b) Why have conservatives and liberals taken the positions they have on issues relating to the pandemic (e.g., masks, economic reopening, vaccines, science)? and (c) How can we reduce this polarization and work more effectively with others to face societal challenges, despite our differences? © 2022 Society for Values in Higher Education. All rights reserved.

Information, partisanship, and preferences in a pandemic.

We investigate the role of information exposure in shaping attitudes and behaviors related to the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic and whether baseline political affiliation and news diet mediate effects. In December 2020, we randomly assigned 5,009 U.S. adults to nine brief text-based segments related to the dynamics of the pandemic and the safety of various behaviors, estimating the effects on 15 binary outcomes related to COVID-19 policy preferences, expected consumer behavior, and beliefs about safety. Average effects reach significance (95% CI) in 47 out of 120 models and equal 7.4 ppt. The baseline effects are large for all outcomes except beliefs. By contrast, interaction effects by political party and media diet are significant for beliefs but rarely significant for policy and behavioral attitudes. These findings suggest partisan policy and behavioral gaps are driven, at least in part, by exposure to different information and that equalizing information sources would lead to partisan convergence in beliefs.

The impact of corona populism: Empirical evidence from Austria and theory.

I study the co-evolution between public opinion and party policy in situations of crises by investigating a policy U-turn of a major Austrian right-wing party (FPÖ) during the Covid-19 pandemic. My analysis suggests the existence of both i) a "Downsian" effect, which causes voters to adapt their party preferences based on policy congruence and ii) a "party identification" effect, which causes partisans to realign their policy preferences based on "their" party's platform. Specifically, I use individual-level panel data to show that i) "corona skeptical" voters who did not vote for the FPÖ in the pre-Covid-19 elections of 2019 were more likely to vote for the party after it embraced "corona populism", and ii) beliefs of respondents who declared that they voted for the FPÖ in 2019 diverged from the rest of the population in three out of four health-related dimensions only after the turn, causing them to underestimate the threat posed by Covid-19 compared to the rest of the population. Using aggregate-level panel data, I study whether the turn has produced significant behavioral differences which could be observed in terms of reported cases and deaths per capita. Paradoxically, after the turn the FPÖ vote share is significantly positively correlated with deaths per capita, but not with the reported number of infections. I hypothesize that this can be traced back to a self-selection bias in testing, which causes a correlation between the number of "corona skeptics" and the share of unreported cases after the turn. I find empirical support for this hypothesis in individual-level data from a Covid-19 prevalence study that involves information about participants' true vs. reported infection status. I finally study a simple heterogeneous mixing epidemiological model and show that a testing bias can indeed explain the apparent paradox of an increase in deaths without an increase in reported cases. My results can, among others, be used to enrich formal analyses regarding the co-evolution between voter and party behavior.

Affective Polarization Did Not Increase During the COVID-19 Pandemic

We document trends in affective polarization during the COVID-19 pandemic. In our main measure, affective polarization is relatively flat between July 2019 and February 2020, then falls significantly around the onset of the pandemic. Three of five other data sources display a similar downward trend, with two of five data sources showing no significant change. A survey experiment shows that priming respondents to think about the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic significantly reduces affective polarization.

Politically-polarized perceptions of governmental autonomy-support impact internal motivations to comply with COVID-19 safety guidelines.

Compliance with health safety guidelines is essential during pandemics. However, political polarization in the U.S. is reducing compliance. We investigated how polarized perceptions of government leaders' autonomy-support and enforcement policies impacted security and internally-motivated compliance with national (Study 1a) and state (Study 1b) safety guidelines. We surveyed 773 Republicans and Democrats from four states (California, Florida, New York, Texas) during the first wave of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. Overall, participants perceived that the decision processes of opposing political administrations did not support their autonomy. Lack of autonomy-support was associated with reduced security and internal motivations to comply (R 2 = 50.83%). When political administrations enforced health safety mandates (Democrat state leaders in this study) and were perceived as autonomy-supportive, participants reported the highest security and internally-motivated compliance (R 2 = 49.57%). This effect was especially pronounced for Republicans, who reacted negatively to enforcement without autonomy-support. Political leaders who use fair and supportive decision-making processes may legitimize enforcement of health safety guidelines, improving compliance. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11031-022-09974-x.

Political views, health literacy, and COVID-19 beliefs and behaviors: A moderated mediation model.

RATIONALE: Mitigating the spread of COVID-19 requires that people understand the need for and engage in protective behaviors. Given the complexity and rapid progression of media information about the pandemic, health literacy could be essential to acquiring the accurate beliefs, concern for societal risks, and appreciation of restrictive policies needed to motivate these behaviors. Yet with the increasingly politicized nature of COVID-related issues in the United States, health literacy could be an asset for those with more liberal views but less so for those with more conservative views. OBJECTIVE: This study tested a hypothesized model proposing that political views moderate the associations of health literacy with COVID-19 protective behaviors as well as the mediational roles of accurate and inaccurate COVID-19 beliefs, concern for society, and governmental control attitudes. METHODS: We surveyed residents in three diverse regions of California in June 2020 (N = 669) and February 2021 (N = 611). Participants completed measures of health literacy, political views, and COVID-19 beliefs and behaviors. RESULTS: Moderated mediational analyses largely supported the proposed model with both samples. Health literacy was associated with more accurate COVID-19 beliefs, less inaccurate COVID-19 beliefs, greater concern for societal risks, more positive attitudes regarding restrictive government control, more protective behavior, less risky behavior, and stronger vaccine intentions; beliefs, concern for society, and governmental control attitudes mediated the health literacy-behavior relationships. As predicted, however, these associations of health literacy with adaptive beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors varied according to political views. The direct and mediated relationships were held for participants with more liberal views and, to a lesser extent, for those with moderate views, but they were weaker or absent for participants with more conservative views. CONCLUSIONS: These findings contribute new evidence of processes linking health literacy with adaptive beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors and how social and political contexts can shape those processes.

Stance Trees: A Novel Approach for Assessing Politically Polarized Issues in Twitter

Social and political polarization, which sometimes is the result of misinformation, is a common obstacle that can be harmful at the moment of communicating government policies. Intelligent tools that aid critical thinking in the light of different opinions and standpoints available in social media can help ameliorate this obstacle. This paper presents preliminary research work toward developing such tools by proposing a methodology for building stance trees based on tweets collected from social media. Stance trees are hierarchical structures where nodes represent arguments pro, anti, or uncertain about a target issue and edges stand for attack relations between those arguments. The proposed methodology includes retrieving tweets relevant to the target issue, manually labeling a sample set of the collected tweets, developing and applying a model for stance detection, and finally building a stance tree. We illustrate the expected results through a case study on the politically polarized "COVID-19 vaccine"issue. Our preliminary results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposal and highlight the utility of stance trees as a tool for aiding critical thinking. © 2022 ACM.

A Social Cognitive Theory Approach to Understanding Parental Attitudes and Intentions to Vaccinate Children during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

The distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine represents a path towards global health after a worldwide pandemic. Yet, the U.S. response to the vaccination rollout has been politically polarized. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of the contextual factors that influence parents' attitudes towards health officials and their intention to vaccinate children, focusing on communication behaviors, personal factors, and geographic locations. We use Bandura's triadic reciprocal determinism (TRD) model which posits reciprocal influence between personal factors, environmental factors, and behaviors. We found that personal factors (having younger children and identifying as Republican partisans), and the behavioral factor of conservative news use were significantly related to more negative attitudes towards health officials and lower vaccination intentions. Conversely, Democrats and liberal news use were significantly related to warmer attitudes and greater vaccination intentions. The environmental factor of geographic location across four states with different partisan dynamics was not significantly related to attitudes and behavioral intentions. Results from a post-hoc analysis show that news media use and partisanship were the strongest correlates of parents' attitudes towards health officials. This evidence points to the politicization of the COVID-19 vaccine being a key consideration regarding vaccine uptake.

Uniting Politics and Pandemic: A Social Network Analysis on the COVID Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry in Brazil

Installed in April 2021, the COVID-19 Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry (PCI) aimed to investigate omissions and irregularities committed by the federal government during the COVID pandemic in Brazil, which resulted in the death of more than 660,000 Brazilians and placed it among the countries with the most deaths caused by COVID-19. The investigated government was elected in 2018, in one of the most polarized elections in Brazilian history, and social media played a prominent role in this polarization. Not far from that, the PCI also generated a great popular commotion on social media networks. This paper aims to analyze the public debate related to the PCI of COVID on Twitter, identifying groups, examining their characteristics and interactions, and verifying evidence of political polarization in this social network. For this, we collected 3,397,933 tweets over a period of 26 weeks, and analyzed four distinct networks, based on different types of users interactions, to identify the main actors and verify the presence of segregated groups. In addition, we use natural language preprocessing to detect group characteristics and toxic speech. As a result, we identified three users groups, based on their use of hashtags and using a community detection technique. The group against the PCI is made up of conservatives and supporters of the government targeted by the investigations and presents the highest internal homogeneity. The other two groups, moderated users and opposed to the government, are formed by actors from the most varied political spectrum, containing users from the political left, center, and right, in addition to the main media outlets in the country. Moreover, other evidences of political polarization were found even in less segregated networks, where users from different groups interact with each other, but with the presence of toxic speech. © 2022 ACM.

Twitter’s Role in Digital Democracy, Post-Truth, and Political Polarization

Although the presidential election in the United States of America (USA) in November 2020 took place under the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become one of the important points in terms of digitalization and the agenda. Donald Trump, who lost the election to Joe Biden, challenged the re-sults, and even refused to concede for some time. Joe Biden, who based his election campaign on democracy and diversity, took the oath of office as the 46th President of the United States on January 20, 2021. His inauguration ceremony was marked by a call for “unity”. The ceremony became the agenda of social media as well as traditional media, and users simultaneously shared posts reflecting their views and attitudes on social media platforms. Most of these posts (on Twitter) were made using the hashtags #DonaldTrump and #inaugurationday. The discussion and political polarization that start-ed during the election process continued after the election through social networks. In the study, the role of Twitter in digital democracy as well as its potential to serve as a public space were examined through the network and its features, interactions, and factions that were formed within the framework of the related hashtags on the inauguration day (January 20, 2021). Methodologically, social network analysis was utilized. The results indicate that the political agenda-setters on Twitter are dominating and resonate with users in terms of interaction. © 2022, National University of Political Studies and Public Administration. All rights reserved.

How populists fuel polarization and fail their response to COVID-19: An empirical analysis

How well have populist leaders responded to the COVID-19 pandemic? There is a growing literature dedicated to populism and health outcomes. However, the ongoing pandemic provides us with a unique opportunity to study whether populist leaders fared better or worse than their non-populist counterparts by using a much larger sample size. While there has been a fruitful debate over whether populism is responsible for worse health outcomes, much of the focus has centered around the overall effect of having populist parties in power, without testing for different explanatory mechanisms. We argue that populist leaders fuel mass political polarization, which increases the overall level of hostility among the population and reduces their willingness to comply with anti-COVID measures and, more generally, contribute to public good. We test this theory using the expert-coded V-Party Dataset which contains variables for the ideological characteristics for parties around the world, as well as weekly excess mortality from the World Mortality Dataset. In addition to the OLS regression analysis, we employ a causal mediation framework to account for the order of succession of populism and political polarization. Our empirical results corroborate our main hypothesis that populism fuels political polarization, which is, in turn, associated with higher excess mortality during the ongoing pandemic. Our results are robust to alternative model specifications. Copyright © 2022 Naushirvanov, Rosenberg, Sawyer and Seyis.

Party over pandemic: Polarized trust in political leaders and experts explains public support for COVID-19 policies

Two experiments examined the polarization of public support for COVID-19 policies due to people’s (lack of) trust in political leaders and nonpartisan experts. In diverse samples in the United States (Experiment 1;N = 1,802) and the United Kingdom (Experiment 2;N = 1,825), participants evaluated COVID-19 policies that were framed as proposed by ingroup political leaders, outgroup political leaders, nonpartisan experts, or, in the United States, a bipartisan group of political leaders. At the time of the study in April 2020, COVID-19 was an unfamiliar and shared threat. Therefore, there were theoretical reasons suggesting that attitudes toward COVID-19 policy may not have been politically polarized. Yet, our results demonstrated that even relatively early in the pandemic people supported policies from ingroup political leaders more than the same policies from outgroup leaders, extending prior research on how people align their policy stances to political elites from their own parties. People also trusted experts and ingroup political leaders more than they did outgroup political leaders. Partly because of this polarized trust, policies from experts and bipartisan groups were more widely supported than policies from ingroup political leaders. These results illustrate the potentially detrimental role political leaders may play and the potential for effective leadership by bipartisan groups and nonpartisan experts in shaping public policy attitudes during crises. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Group Processes & Intergroup Relations is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Political polarization on Twitter during the COVID-19 pandemic: a case study in Brazil.

The debate over the COVID-19 pandemic is constantly trending at online conversations since its beginning in 2019. The discussions in many social media platforms is related not only to health aspects of the disease, but also public policies and non-pharmacological measures to mitigate the spreading of the virus and propose alternative treatments. Divergent opinions regarding these measures are leading to heated discussions and polarization. Particularly in highly politically polarized countries, users tend to be divided in those in-favor or against government policies. In this work we present a computational method to analyze Twitter data and: (i) identify users with a high probability of being bots using only COVID-19 related messages; (ii) quantify the political polarization of the Brazilian general public in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic; (iii) analyze how bots tweet and affect political polarization. We collected over 100 million tweets from 26 April 2020 to 3 January 2021, and observed in general a highly polarized population (with polarization index varying from 0.57 to 0.86), which focuses on very different topics of discussions over the most polarized weeks-but all related to government and health-related events.

Under or out of Government Control? The Effects of Individual Mental Health and Political Views on the Attribution of Responsibility for COVID-19 Incidence Rates

The paper shows the role of mental health and political views in attributing responsibility for COVID-19 incidence rates to the government and factors beyond government control. Authors' hypotheses draw on the classic and new versions of attribution theories, on literature from political psychology about the process of blaming the government for natural catastrophes, and also on local socio-political specifics (political polarization). The empirical data used in the article come from the survey carried out on-line via a professional research panel at the turn of May and June 2020, after about three months of lockdown, and during the presidential election campaign. The research sample included 850 Polish adults (aged 18 to 84) fully diversified in terms of gender, age, and education (the sample was representative for the Polish population in terms of respondents' place of residence and the country's region). To measure attribution of responsibility, the authors developed an 8-item instrument. Half of the instrument’s items indicate government and state institutions' responsibility and half describe circumstances not related to the government. The results showed that the respondents tended to attribute more responsibility for COVID-19 effects to the government than other ("non-government") factors. In explaining the government's responsibility, political views and party preferences play an incomparably more significant role than mental health symptoms. The authors interpret these results as the effect of attitudinal and affective political polarization of Polish society. © 2022 Turk Deprem Arastirma Dergisi. All rights reserved.

Relationships between corruption, electoral polarization, economic growth and inequality in the Peruvian case

This study analyzes the relationships between the variables of corruption, political polarization, economic growth, and income inequality for the Peruvian economy over the period 1998-2020. The methodology used to verify the degree of association and/or causality of the study variables were Pearson's correlation, linear, and quadratic regressions. The results point to a significant negative correlation between corruption and economic growth, and between electoral polarization and GDP, but that political polarization is positively associated with economic inequality measured by the Gini index (alpha = 1%). It was also found that economic growth decreases inequality. Therefore, it is concluded that corruption decreases economic growth, but that there is a "U"-shaped relationship between corruption and the Gini index. Consequently, at lower levels of corruption, an increase in the corruption perceptions index (CPI) decreases the Gini coefficient, but at higher levels of corruption, a rise in the CPI increases income inequality. Finally, the global coronavirus crisis has aggravated inequality in developed and developing countries, so it is recommended that policymakers implement political measures to reduce economic inequality and, at the same time, mitigate political polarization.

Perceived risk, political polarization, and the willingness to follow COVID-19 mitigation guidelines.

OBJECTIVE: Risk assessment and response is important for understanding human behavior. The divisive context surrounding the coronavirus pandemic inspires our exploration of risk perceptions and the polarization of mitigation practices (i.e., the degree to which the behaviors of people on the political "Left" diverge from those on the "Right"). Specifically, we investigate the extent to which the political polarization of willingness to comply with mitigation behaviors changes with risk perceptions. METHOD: Analyses use data from two sources: an original dataset of Twitter posts and a nationally-representative survey. In the Twitter data, negative binomial regression models are used to predict mitigation intent measured using tweet counts. In the survey data, logit models predict self-reported mitigation behavior (vaccination, masking, and social distancing). RESULTS: Findings converged across both datasets, supporting the idea that the links between political orientation and willingness to follow mitigation guidelines depend on perceived risk. People on the Left are more inclined than their Right-oriented colleagues to follow guidelines, but this polarization tends to decrease as the perceived risk of COVID-19 intensifies. Additionally, we find evidence that exposure to COVID-19 infections sends ambiguous signals about the risk of the virus while COVID-19 related deaths have a more consistent impact on mitigation behaviors. CONCLUSIONS: Pandemic-related risks can create opportunities for perceived "common ground," between the political "Right" and "Left." Risk perceptions and politics interact in their links to intended COVID-19 mitigation behavior (as measured both on Twitter and in a national survey). Our results invite a more complex interpretation of political polarization than those stemming from simplistic analyses of partisanship and ideology.

The price of political polarization: Evidence from municipal issuers during the coronavirus pandemic.

This study estimates the financial costs imposed by political polarization among citizens on U.S. local governments during the COVID-19 pandemic. We measure local political polarization by using citizens' voting results in the presidential elections. We find local political polarization leads to higher offering yield of the bonds issued by the U.S. municipalities. The impact on borrowing costs is exaggerated by the number of pandemic cases in the local area, suggesting political polarization hinders the making and enforcement of government measures for the pandemic. This study highlights the mechanisms through which financial markets and local political ideology jointly affect social welfare.

Belief change in times of crisis: Providing facts about COVID-19-induced inequalities closes the partisan divide but fuels intra-partisan polarization about inequality.

Population-based survey research demonstrates that growing economic divides in Western countries have not gone together with increased popular concern about inequality. Extant explanations focus on 'misperception': people generally underestimate the extent of inequality and overestimate society's meritocratic nature. However, scholarly attempts to correct people's misperceptions have produced mixed results. We ask whether COVID-19, by upending everyday life, has made people responsive to information about inequality, even if that entails crossing ideological divides. We field an original survey experiment in the United States, a least-likely case of belief change, given high levels of inequality and partisan polarization. Our informational treatment increases (1) concerns over economic inequality, (2) support for redistribution, and (3) acknowledgement that COVID-19 has especially hurt the most vulnerable. Information provision renders non-significant the partisan gap between moderate Democrats and Republicans but increases that between moderate and strong Republicans. We discuss our findings' implications and suggestions for further research.