Politicization of Science in COVID-19 Vaccine Communication: Comparing US Politicians, Medical Experts, and Government Agencies

Abstract

We compare the social media discourses on COVID-19 vaccines constructed by U.S. politicians, medical experts, and government agencies at the subnational level and investigate how various contextual factors influence the likelihood of government agencies politicizing the issue. Taking the political corpus and the medical corpus as two extremes, we propose a language-based definition of politicization of science and measure it on a continuous scale. By building a machine learning classifier that captures subtle linguistic indicators of politicization and applying it to two years of government agencies' Facebook posting history, we demonstrate that: 1) U.S. politicians heavily politicized COVID-19 vaccines, medical experts conveyed minimal politicization, and government agencies' discourse was a mix of the two, yet more closely resembled medical experts'; 2) increasing COVID-19 infection rates reduced government agencies' politicization tendencies; 3) government agencies in Democratic-leaning states were more likely to politicize COVID-19 vaccines than those in Republican-leaning states; and 4) the degree of politicization did not significantly differ across agencies' jurisdiction levels. We discuss the conceptualization of politicization of science, the incumbency effect, and government communication as an emerging area for political communication research.

Emotion Work on Social Media: Differences in Public and Private Emotions about Politics and COVID-19 on Facebook

“…We find that the two topics were distinct: expressions of one were negatively correlated with expressions of the other, and people exhibited different emotional reactions to the two topics. These findings align with other research suggesting that politics and political partisanship may matter less than expected when looking at how people receive, give, or evaluate messages about COVID-19 (Bode & Vraga, 2021) and evidence that the politicization of scientific topics is due to a variety of elite actors (e.g., Bolsen & Druckman, 2015;Zhou et al, 2023), not just politicians.…”

“…Bolsen and Druckman (2015) define the politicization of scientific issues as when "an actor emphasizes the inherent uncertainty of science to cast doubt on the existence of scientific consensus" (p. 746). Importantly, those who cast doubt on science need not be political actors, although, as recent research suggests in the case of COVID-19, political actors are the most likely to do so (Zhou et al, 2023). Still, research shows that while political ideology is strongly correlated with COVID-19 attitudes, it is not perfectly correlated (Gadarian et al, 2021), suggesting that individuals do have the potential to distinguish between the COVID-19 pandemic and politics in general.…”