Scared into Action: How Partisanship and Fear are Associated with Reactions to Public Health Directives

TL;DR

This study investigates how partisanship and fear influence adherence to COVID-19 health directives, revealing that conservatives' compliance increases with heightened fear, as shown through analysis of official communications, social media, and mobility data.

Contribution

It reconciles conflicting findings by showing that fear mediates conservatives' adherence to health directives, based on multi-source data analysis during COVID-19.

Findings

Conservatives adhere more to health directives when expressing fear.

Official communications and case numbers increase fear expressions on Twitter.

Fear mediates the relationship between partisanship and health behavior.

Abstract

Differences in political ideology are increasingly appearing as an impediment to successful bipartisan communication from local leadership. For example, recent empirical findings have shown that conservatives are less likely to adhere to COVID-19 health directives. This behavior is in direct contradiction to past research which indicates that conservatives are more rule abiding, prefer to avoid loss, and are more prevention-motivated than liberals. We reconcile this disconnect between recent empirical findings and past research by using insights gathered from press releases, millions of tweets, and mobility data capturing local movement in retail, grocery, workplace, parks, and transit domains during COVID-19 shelter-in-place orders. We find that conservatives adhere to health directives when they express more fear of the virus. In order to better understand this phenomenon, we analyze both official and citizen communications and find that press releases from local and federal government, along with the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases, lead to an increase in expressions of fear on Twitter.