Pandemics and Partisanship: Following Old Paths into Uncharted Territory

Abstract

Although partisan politics tend be set aside during crisis, the timing of gubernatorial actions in response to COVID-19 is telling about how partisanship is shaping the way elected officials are reacting to this pandemic. Using an event history analysis, the authors find that Democratic governors responded to the White House’s attempts to downplay the severity of the pandemic by declaring emergencies in order to draw citizen attention to and to prepare for a public health crisis. On the other hand, Republican governors resisted doing so until Trump declared a national emergency on March 13; however, Republican reactions were conditional on the president’s job approval in their states. While the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed governments into uncharted territory, state governors appear to be following patterns of vertical partisan competition that mirror those of more conventional policy areas in recent years.

Governing in a Polarized Era: Federalism and the Response of U.S. State and Federal Governments to the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Declaring a state of emergency empowers governors to take extraordinary measures to protect public health and safety, such as stay-at-home orders. Fowler et al (2021) developed an event history model in which the dependent variable is the date the emergency was declared; they control for other variables such as the proportion of the population over age sixty and population density, both of which are related to higher mortality and morbidity. They found that “Democratic governors were about 2.67 times quicker to declare a state of emergency than Republican governors, which largely conforms to our expectations of a partisan gap in responses to the pandemic” ( Fowler et al 2021 , 9).…”

“… Fowler et al (2021) developed an event history model in which the dependent variable is the date the emergency was declared; they control for other variables such as the proportion of the population over age sixty and population density, both of which are related to higher mortality and morbidity. They found that “Democratic governors were about 2.67 times quicker to declare a state of emergency than Republican governors, which largely conforms to our expectations of a partisan gap in responses to the pandemic” ( Fowler et al 2021 , 9). They also found that Republican governors were quicker to adopt emergency declarations in states where Trump was less popular, which suggests that these governors responded to the specific political climate in their states.…”

Is It Still a Mandate If We Don’t Enforce It? The Politics of COVID-related Mask Mandates in Conservative States

“…Underlying these dynamics is that federalism has served as a battleground for partisan warfare in recent years, which is part of a larger pattern of divergent policies across states. Specific to COVID-19, Democratic governors asserted their power, at least partially, as a political strategy to challenge the Trump White House, while Republican governors were wary of breaking from party doctrine set by the President (Goelzhauser and Rose 2017;Daguerre and Conlan 2020;Kettl 2020;Kincaid and Leckrone 2020;Fowler, Kettler, and Witt 2021).…”

COVID-19 Communication Ecology: Visualizing Communication Resource Connections During a Public Health Emergency Using Network Analysis

“…U.S. state public health responses to the pandemic have also differed based on partisanship. Democratic governors moved more quickly to make emergency declarations related to COVID-19 than did Republican governors ( Fowler et al, 2020 ). Thus, if COVID-19 beliefs and behaviors are observed to organize according to political ideology, it makes sense that partisan communication resources would be important in COVID-19 communication ecologies.…”