Trial reportPloS one2021
Partisanship, health behavior, and policy attitudes in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Trial report in PloS one, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 222 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
222 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Political Polarization During Disease Outbreaks: A Meta-Analysis of Archival Survey Data From Polio to COVID-19.American journal of public health · 2026Pooled it
- People Wear Masks when they Ski: Comparing Congruent and Incongruent Behavioral Context Appeals.Journal of health communication · 2023Trial
- Partisanship, Messaging, and the COVID-19 Vaccine: Evidence From Survey Experiments.American journal of health promotion : AJHP · 2022Trial
- Social distancing in America: Understanding long-term adherence to COVID-19 mitigation recommendations.PloS one · 2021Trial
- Social network exposures, political party affiliation, and perceived health risk.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2026Article
- The paradox of neglecting changes in behavior: How standard epidemic models misestimate both transmissibility and final epidemic size.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Political Beliefs and Legitimacy of Government Restrictions During the COVID-19 Pandemic.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Polarization and health-related behaviors and outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic: a systematic review.SSM - population health · 2026Article
- Partisan differences in health behaviors can impact respiratory disease dynamics.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- Article
- Partisan differences in healthcare decision-making: Evidence from a vaccine experiment.PloS one · 2026Article
- Economic shock and the erosion of COVID-19 precautionary behavior in Canada during the early pandemic.PloS one · 2026Article
- Regional and temporal patterns of partisan polarization during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States and Canada.PloS one · 2026Article
- Partisan Divergence in Fertility Change Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Florida.Population research and policy review · 2025Article
- Characterizing population-level changes in human behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Political ideology and trust in scientists in the USA.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- Policy stakeholders' perspectives and use of data, research evidence, and misinformation in three counties in California, USA during the COVID-19 pandemic, 2020-2022.Preventive medicine reports · 2025Article
- Political identity and risk politics: Evidence from a pandemic.Risk analysis : an official publication of the Society for Risk Analysis · 2025Article
- Panethnic fate unlinked: Who finds the term "Chinese virus" acceptable?Social science quarterly · 2025Article
- Geosocial Media's Early Warning Capabilities Across US County-Level Political Clusters: Observational Study.JMIR infodemiology · 2025Observational
162 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
objectiveTo study the U.S. public's health behaviors, attitudes, and policy opinions about COVID-19 in the earliest weeks of the national health crisis (March 20-23, 2020).
methodWe designed and fielded an original representative survey of 3,000 American adults between March 20-23, 2020 to collect data on a battery of 38 health-related behaviors, government policy preferences on COVID-19 response and worries about the pandemic. We test for partisan differences COVID-19 related policy attitudes and behaviors, measured in three different ways: party affiliation, intended 2020 Presidential vote, and self-placed ideological positioning. Our multivariate approach adjusts for a wide range of individual demographic and geographic characteristics that might confound the relationship between partisanship and health behaviors, attitudes, and preferences.
resultsWe find that partisanship-measured as party identification, support for President Trump, or left-right ideological positioning-explains differences in Americans across a wide range of health behaviors and policy preferences. We find no consistent evidence that controlling for individual news consumption, the local policy environment, and local pandemic-related deaths erases the observed partisan differences in health behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes. In further analyses, we use a LASSO regression approach to select predictors, and find that a partisanship indicator is the most commonly selected predictor across the 38 dependent variables that we study.
conclusionOur analysis of individual self-reported behavior, attitudes, and policy preferences in response to COVID-19 reveals that partisanship played a central role in shaping individual responses in the earliest months of the COVID-19 pandemic. These results indicate that partisan differences in responding to a national public health emergency were entrenched from the earliest days of the pandemic.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.