Polarized politics: protest against COVID-19 containment policies in the USA

Pfaff, Katharina Gabriela, Plümper, Thomas and Neumayer, Eric ORCID: 0000-0003-2719-7563 (2023) Polarized politics: protest against COVID-19 containment policies in the USA. Political Science Quarterly, 138 (1). 23 - 46. ISSN 1538-165X

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Abstract

Protest against containment policies in US states is fueled by two drivers: the stringency of containment policies and the partisan control over the governorship and legislatures in each state. In our analysis over the period from March 2020 to March 2022, we find more protest events in states fully controlled by Democrats than in Republican controlled states both in a sample consisting of all states and a balanced sample in which we constrain observations to those red and blue states with on average similarly stringent containment policies. Protest was therefore politicized and we find that partisanship exerts a roughly equal substantive effect on the number of protest events as the stringency of containment policies. If we assume no direct effect of partisanship on protest but allow for causal heterogeneity along partisan lines in the effect of containment policies, we find that the same increase in the stringency of policies evokes a stronger protest response in blue states than in red states.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/1538165x
Additional Information:	© 2023 The Author(s)
Divisions:	Geography & Environment
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HV Social pathology. Social and public welfare. Criminology R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine > RA0421 Public health. Hygiene. Preventive Medicine J Political Science > JK Political institutions (United States)
Date Deposited:	28 Jul 2022 09:15
Last Modified:	15 Nov 2024 01:06
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/115687

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