Polarization and public health: Partisan differences in social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic.

We study partisan differences in Americans' response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Political leaders and media outlets on the right and left have sent divergent messages about the severity of the crisis, which could impact the extent to which Republicans and Democrats engage in social distancing and other efforts to reduce disease transmission. We develop a simple model of a pandemic response with heterogeneous agents that clarifies the causes and consequences of heterogeneous responses. We use location data from a large sample of smartphones to show that areas with more Republicans engaged in less social distancing, controlling for other factors including public policies, population density, and local COVID cases and deaths. We then present new survey evidence of significant gaps at the individual level between Republicans and Democrats in self-reported social distancing, beliefs about personal COVID risk, and beliefs about the future severity of the pandemic.

A note on internet use and the 2016 U.S. presidential election outcome.

We use data from the American National Election Studies from 1996 to 2016 to study the role of the internet in the 2016 U.S. presidential election outcome. We compare trends in the Republican share of the vote between likely and unlikely internet users, and between actual internet users and non-users. Relative to prior years, the Republican share of the vote in 2016 was as high or higher among the groups least active online.

Greater Internet use is not associated with faster growth in political polarization among US demographic groups.

We combine eight previously proposed measures to construct an index of political polarization among US adults. We find that polarization has increased the most among the demographic groups least likely to use the Internet and social media. Our overall index and all but one of the individual measures show greater increases for those older than 65 than for those aged 18-39. A linear model estimated at the age-group level implies that the Internet explains a small share of the recent growth in polarization.