Pandemic Politics in the United States: COVID‐19 as a New Type of Political Emergency

Abstract

Does a state of emergency necessarily contract human behavior? In times of security crises, for instance, citizens overcome their divides. Our analysis explores the relationship between county‐level partisanship in the United States during COVID‐19 and mobility. We provide an original theoretical analysis to distinguish pandemic politics from politics in times of emergency as we had known them. Our framework helps reconcile previous contradictory findings about this type of emergency politics. Such a frame is needed as it has been a century since the last major global pandemic and COVID‐19 may not be the last. There are five reasons to distinguish COVID‐19 from previously familiar types of emergency politics: psychological, national sentiments, policy related, elite related, and time related. Our extensive mobility big data (462,115 county*days from March–August 2020) are uniquely informative about pandemic politics. In times of pandemic, people literally vote with their feet on government actions. The data are highly representative of the U.S. population. At the pandemic outbreak, our exploratory innovative analysis suggests political divides are exacerbated. Later, with mixed messages about the plague from party leadership, such exceedingly partisan patterns dissipate. They make way to less politically infused and more educationally, demographically, and economically driven behavior.

Ideologically‐based contact avoidance during a pandemic: Blunt or selective distancing from ‘others’?

“…Note also that RWA and SDO showed the key pattern in Study 3, with these individual differences generally considered ‘intergroup’ variables (Hodson & Costello, 2007; Hodson & Esses, 2005). Rather than reflecting disease concerns, ideologically based reactions to COVID left–right disparities may reflect more how Americans think their party wants them to behave (i.e., toeing the party line) (see Douglas & Sutton, 2022), or reflect responses to messaging from political elites (Sommer & Rappel‐Kroyzer, 2022), as opposed to reflecting deeply rooted ideological differences (and certainly those involving contagion concerns).…”

“Nocturnal cities : past, present, and future”

“…At the time of writing this introductory text to this special issue, Nocturnal Cities : Past, present, and Future, the night in many cities from the Global South, East, and North is glowing again after a three-year pandemic period characterised by the application of massive lockdowns, night curfews, social distancing, mandatory home confinements, and a strong punitive criminalization of the institutional-media-civic front against 'the night' and the youth (Nofre et al, 2023). After this brief but intense and dark period of pandemic politics (Dionne & Turkmen, 2020 ;Lynch et al, 2022 ;Ryan & Nanda, 2023 ;Sommer & Rappel-Kroyzer, 2022), the urban night is once again as vibrant as it was in the years prior to the pandemic. Every weekend tens of thousands of people go out to dine, meet friends or dance ; thousands more work at night in back-office and logistics centres, supply centres, essential services and health institutions (Dušková & Duijzing, 2022 ;Lin et al, 2022 ;Shaw, 2022) ; many use nighttime public transport, ride-sharing companies, or take their own vehicle to get across the city (Halás & Klapka, 2023 ;Plyushteva, 2021).…”