Objective: Although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention eventually recommended wearing masks in public to slow the spread of the coronavirus, the practice has been unevenly distributed in the United States. Methods: In this article, we model county-level infrequent mask usage as a function of three pillars of conservatism: (1) Republican political leadership (percentage of votes for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election), (2) conservative Protestantism (percentage evangelical Christian), and (3) right-wing media consumption (Google searches for Fox News). Results: Our analyses indicate that mask usage tends to be lower in counties with greater support for President Trump (in majority Trump counties), counties with more evangelical Christians, and areas with greater interest in Fox News. Conclusion: Given the effectiveness of masks in limiting the transmission of respiratory droplets, conservative ideological resistance to public health and recommended pandemic lifestyles may indirectly support the spread of the coronavirus. KEYWORDS COVID-19, health behavior, politicsAfter spreading around the world in a matter of months, the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19) has become a leading cause of death in the United States. According to the Coronavirus Resource Center at Johns Hopkins University (2021), nearly 600,000 Americans have already died from COVID-19. Although the United States accounts for only 4 percent of the global population, it has contributed 17 percent of all COVID-19 deaths worldwide. In an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, 2020) have proposed several mitigation strategies like staying home, social distancing, hand sanitizing, and wearing masks or other protective face coverings. The recommendation of wearing masks has been particularly contentious in the United States. Because wearing a mask is so important for public health, we must begin to seriously model this polarization. The fundamental question

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Recently, much scholarly work has been conducted examining the effect of rising income inequality on health outcomes. However, this work is somewhat inconclusive. Chiefly, the mechanisms which could produce such an association are still being sorted out. Further, much of this work is focused on mortality outcomes with little attention to how this process operates for actual health conditions, including chronic health problems, which are arguably now the main public health concerns of the developed world. In this study, in a series of multilevel binary logistic regression models using data from the 2005 and 2007 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), we examine the association between state-level income inequality, poverty, and social welfare measures on spending and policy to examine the association between these factors for three chronic health outcomes: diabetes, hypertension, and coronary heart disease. We find that income inequality is only conditionally positively related to the diagnosis of two of the three outcomes, diabetes and hypertension, and only in 2007. However, absolute poverty is related to the outcome across all three dependent variables. Additionally, certain social welfare measures attenuate the effects of both income inequality and absolute poverty, suggesting that certain welfare policies reduce this association.

Background In this paper, we integrate theory and research from sociology, psychology, and political science to develop and test a mediation model that helps to explain why political conservatism is often associated with pandemic behaviors and lifestyles that are inconsistent with public health recommendations for COVID-19. Methods Using national data from the 2021 Crime, Health, and Politics Survey (n = 1743), we formally test the indirect effects of political conservatism (an index of Republican party identification, conservative political orientation, right-wing news media consumption, and 2020 Trump vote) on pandemic lifestyles (an index of social distancing, hand sanitizing, mask usage, and vaccination) through the mechanisms of empathy (concern about the welfare of others), authoritarian beliefs (authoritarian aggressiveness and acquiescence to authority), and pandemic threat perceptions (threats to self and to the broader society). Result Our results confirm that political conservatism is associated with riskier pandemic lifestyles. We also find that this association is partially mediated by lower levels of empathy, higher levels of authoritarian beliefs, and lower levels of perceived pandemic threat. Conclusions Understanding why political conservatism is associated with riskier pandemic lifestyles may eventually lead us to ways of identifying and overcoming widespread cultural barriers to critical pandemic responses.

E-commerce has altered the relationship between consumers, businesses, and U.S. states. E-retailers are not required to collect sales tax from their customers, thus depriving fiscally insecure states of tax revenue, and providing a competitive advantage for eretailers, like Amazon Inc., in their struggle for market share with brick-and-mortar stores, like Walmart. Attempts at e-commerce sales tax policy by state legislators and brick-and-mortar lobbyists failed until 2008 when New York successfully passed legislation. A subsequent wave of legislation ensued, and between 2008 and 2012, e-commerce sales tax legislation left committee in fourteen states, each experiencing various levels of success. Existing explanatory efforts have not fully accounted for the combinatorial effect of political-institutional structure and market contestation in U.S. state-level policy creation, as well as the likelihood of multiple pathways to passage. Embracing this framework, I use fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to uncover three sufficient pathways for successful passage of e-commerce sales tax policy. Two paths highlight the confluence of large retailer pressure and a conductive political-institutional structure facing fiscal stress, while the third path reflects political-institutional forces. These findings corroborate, as well as build upon, our knowledge of fiscal sociology, policy domains, and corporate power in American politics.