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Affective polarization, local contexts and public opinion in America

Nature Human Behaviour volume 5, pages 28–38 (2021)Cite this article

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Abstract

Affective polarization has become a defining feature of twenty-first-century US politics, but we do not know how it relates to citizens’ policy opinions. Answering this question has fundamental implications not only for understanding the political consequences of polarization, but also for understanding how citizens form preferences. Under most political circumstances, this is a difficult question to answer, but the novel coronavirus pandemic allows us to understand how partisan animus contributes to opinion formation. Using a two-wave panel that spans the outbreak of COVID-19, we find a strong association between citizens’ levels of partisan animosity and their attitudes about the pandemic, as well as the actions they take in response to it. This relationship, however, is more muted in areas with severe outbreaks of the disease. Our results make clear that narrowing of issue divides requires not only policy discourse but also addressing affective partisan hostility.

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Fig. 1: COVID-19 attitudes and behaviours, by party.
Fig. 2: COVID-19 attitudes and behaviours, by number of cases in a county.
Fig. 3: The relationship between partisan animosity and partisanship for all three dependent variables in a restricted model, with only the interaction between partisan animosity and partisanship controlling for logged cases in the county.
Fig. 4: Republicans with high partisan animosity are less worried about COVID-19 if there are few cases in the county.
Fig. 5: Republicans with high partisan animosity change fewer behaviours in response to COVID-19.
Fig. 6: Republicans with high partisan animosity are less supportive of policies combatting COVID-19 if there are few cases in the county.
Fig. 7: Marginal effect of high partisan animosity, by party and number of cases.

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Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available via Dataverse at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/H7AT3N.

Code availability

All code that supports the findings of this study are available via Dataverse at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/H7AT3N.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank J. Lin and N. Sands for their research assistance, as well as E. Finkel and E. Groenendyk for feedback. Funding for this study was provided by Northwestern University, the University of Arizona and the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennslyvania. The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science and Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

    James N. Druckman

  2. School of Government and Public Policy, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

    Samara Klar

  3. Department of Political Science, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA

    Yanna Krupnikov & John Barry Ryan

  4. Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Matthew Levendusky

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Contributions

J.N.D. fielded the study and provided the deidentified data. J.N.D., S.K., Y.K., M.L. and J.B.R. designed the research, did preliminary analyses and wrote the manuscript. J.B.R. performed the final analyses and constructed the figures and analyses in Supplementary Information.

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Correspondence to James N. Druckman.

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Peer review information Nature Human Behaviour thanks Alan Abramowitz, Omer Yair and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Peer reviewer reports are available. Primary Handling Editor: Aisha Bradshaw.

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Druckman, J.N., Klar, S., Krupnikov, Y. et al. Affective polarization, local contexts and public opinion in America. Nat Hum Behav 5, 28–38 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-01012-5

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