key: cord-0705077-hq562dx0
authors: Flores, Alexandra; Cole, Jennifer C.; Dickert, Stephan; Eom, Kimin; Jiga-Boy, Gabriela M.; Kogut, Tehila; Loria, Riley; Mayorga, Marcus; Pedersen, Eric J.; Pereira, Beatriz; Rubaltelli, Enrico; Sherman, David K.; Slovic, Paul; Västfjäll, Daniel; Van Boven, Leaf
title: Politicians polarize and experts depolarize public support for COVID-19 management policies across countries
date: 2022-01-18
journal: Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2117543119
sha: 5eb6d6af18923eeca0a6e7779bed3eade16535ab
doc_id: 705077
cord_uid: hq562dx0

Political polarization impeded public support for policies to reduce the spread of COVID-19, much as polarization hinders responses to other contemporary challenges. Unlike previous theory and research that focused on the United States, the present research examined the effects of political elite cues and affective polarization on support for policies to manage the COVID-19 pandemic in seven countries (n = 12,955): Brazil, Israel, Italy, South Korea, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Across countries, cues from political elites polarized public attitudes toward COVID-19 policies. Liberal and conservative respondents supported policies proposed by ingroup politicians and parties more than the same policies from outgroup politicians and parties. Respondents disliked, distrusted, and felt cold toward outgroup political elites, whereas they liked, trusted, and felt warm toward both ingroup political elites and nonpartisan experts. This affective polarization was correlated with policy support. These findings imply that policies from bipartisan coalitions and nonpartisan experts would be less polarizing, enjoying broader public support. Indeed, across countries, policies from bipartisan coalitions and experts were more widely supported. A follow-up experiment replicated these findings among US respondents considering international vaccine distribution policies. The polarizing effects of partisan elites and affective polarization emerged across nations that vary in cultures, ideologies, and political systems. Contrary to some propositions, the United States was not exceptionally polarized. Rather, these results suggest that polarizing processes emerged simply from categorizing people into political ingroups and outgroups. Political elites drive polarization globally, but nonpartisan experts can help resolve the conflicts that arise from it.

Political polarization impeded public support for policies to reduce the spread of COVID-19, much as polarization hinders responses to other contemporary challenges. Unlike previous theory and research that focused on the United States, the present research examined the effects of political elite cues and affective polarization on support for policies to manage the COVID-19 pandemic in seven countries (n = 12,955): Brazil, Israel, Italy, South Korea, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Across countries, cues from political elites polarized public attitudes toward COVID-19 policies. Liberal and conservative respondents supported policies proposed by ingroup politicians and parties more than the same policies from outgroup politicians and parties. Respondents disliked, distrusted, and felt cold toward outgroup political elites, whereas they liked, trusted, and felt warm toward both ingroup political elites and nonpartisan experts. This affective polarization was correlated with policy support. These findings imply that policies from bipartisan coalitions and nonpartisan experts would be less polarizing, enjoying broader public support. Indeed, across countries, policies from bipartisan coalitions and experts were more widely supported. A follow-up experiment replicated these findings among US respondents considering international vaccine distribution policies. The polarizing effects of partisan elites and affective polarization emerged across nations that vary in cultures, ideologies, and political systems. Contrary to some propositions, the United States was not exceptionally polarized. Rather, these results suggest that polarizing processes emerged simply from categorizing people into political ingroups and outgroups. Political elites drive polarization globally, but nonpartisan experts can help resolve the conflicts that arise from it.

COVID-19 j cross-country comparisons j political polarization j affective polarization j expertise B y the summer of 2020, the world had largely converged on two key COVID-19 policy aims: fewer cases and deaths (1) and more robust economic recovery efforts (2) . Yet, policies designed to attain these goals were met with politically polarized responses worldwide, undermining broad public support (3) (4) (5) . As with climate change, rising economic inequality, and other contemporary crises, human behavior both contributes to the spread of and is a solution to the COVID-19 pandemic (6) . Political polarization undermines the cooperation required to enact behavioral change, posing an endemic barrier to effectively addressing such challenges (7, 8) .

We suggest that polarized public opinion toward COVID-19 policies emerged globally merely because said policies were associated with opposing political parties and politicians. The polarizing impact of cues from political elites is often described as a pathology especially pronounced in the United States (9, 10) . Theories developed to explain polarized reactions to political cues have been largely developed within, and thus tend to focus on, the United States (9, 11, 12) . We contend that such American exceptionalism (13) is unwarranted and that these polarizing processes should occur wherever people form political ingroups and outgroups. We gauged public support for COVID-19 policies after manipulating whether policies were attributed to liberal or conservative political elites, with the experiment conducted simultaneously in Brazil, Israel, Italy, South Korea, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This span of countries includes two-party and multiparty systems, liberal and conservative ruling parties, cultures that range in collectivism, differences in overarching political ideologies, and different experiences with the unfolding pandemic, as well as the stringency of policies enacted to manage it (see SI Appendix, Table S2 ).

Political polarization impeded public support for policies to address the spread of COVID-19, much as polarization hinders responses to other societal challenges. The present cross-country study demonstrates how the cues from political elites and affective polarization are analogous across countries addressing COVID-19. Far from being an outlier, the United States faces polarization challenges similar to those of other countries. Importantly, the results demonstrate that policies to combat public health crises are more supported when proposed by nonpartisan experts and bipartisan coalitions of political leaders. These results provide clear guidance on depolarizing communication strategies to improve global responses to health crises.

We reason that polarized public opinion in response to political elites reflects a widespread human tendency to categorize people into political ingroups and outgroups and to respond to cues from those groups (14, 15) . This political categorization engenders social, affective, and cognitive processes that divide public opinion when proposals are associated with political identities (9, (16) (17) (18) . The commonality of these processes should result in similarly polarizing effects across different countries. Understanding these effects within and outside the United States is therefore necessary for developing effective crisis communication strategies, thus fostering better responses to challenges like COVID-19.

Polarizing Political Elites. Prior research conducted in the United States shows that people react to policies based not only on their content but on the political identities of policy proponents. For instance, Democrats support climate policies proposed by Democratic politicians more than the same policies proposed by Republican politicians, and vice versa for Republicans (19) (20) (21) . The polarizing influence of cues from politicians, parties, and other political elites can be so strong that people place "party over policy," with partisans favoring ideologically misaligned policies from their political ingroup over ideologically aligned policies from their political outgroup (19) .

An underexamined question is whether political elite cues polarize public opinion in a similar way and to a similar degree in countries beyond the United States. Direct cross-country comparisons of the polarizing effects of political cues have proven challenging because countries face different politicized policy issues. For instance, research in the United States has examined how political elite cues polarize attitudes toward welfare policies (19) and climate policy (22) (23) (24) (25) , whereas research in other countries has examined infrastructure and drinking age policies (26) . The shared experience of COVID-19 provides a unique and important opportunity to make possible a direct comparison of political elite cues.

Some researchers speculate that political elites may have a greater polarizing impact in the United States because of its greater degree of ideological and cultural sorting (17, 27) , more polarized mainstream media (28) , and more polarized political leaders (29) . Yet, to the extent that political elite cues polarize because they tap widespread psychological processes arising from sociopolitical categorization, political cues should be similarly polarizing across countries. For example, partisan identification predicts identity-defensive political behavior more strongly than ideology, even in multiparty systems like Italy, Sweden, and the United Kingdom (30, 31) .

Affective Polarization. An emerging explanation of why cues from political elites polarize public opinion is that people distrust, dislike, and feel cold toward those in the political outgroup while trusting, liking, and feeling warmly toward those in their political ingroups (8) (9) (10) . Such affective polarization motivates negative behaviors toward opposing political groups, including hiring discrimination, prejudice, and reluctance to socialize with people from opposing political parties (8) (9) (10) .

Researchers have suggested that affective polarization is larger in the United States than in other countries (9), contributing to the prediction that political elite cues should be more polarizing in the United States. We suggest, however, that affective polarization emerges from basic psychological processes following from the categorization of people into political ingroups and outgroups and should thus emerge across countries. The intergroup processes that arise from social categorization are pronounced when groups compete for power and status (32) , as is true of political groups. Some evidence suggests that although the rate at which the United States has become polarized recently is greater than in other countries (33) the overall level of affective polarization may be similar across countries (34) .

Depolarizing Experts and Bipartisan Coalitions. The analysis that political elite cues are polarizing because of affective polarization leads us to expect that cues from nonpartisan experts and bipartisan coalitions will be less polarizing. People trust experts more than they trust politicians, especially more than outgroup politicians (35, 36) . Experts are generally more persuasive than nonexperts (37, 38) , partly because expertise increases perceived source credibility (39) . Although conservatives are somewhat less trusting and more skeptical of experts than liberals (35, 36) , people worldwide report high confidence that nonpartisan scientific experts act in the public's best interest (40) . COVID-19 policies proposed by experts should therefore be supported more than policies proposed by either liberal or conservative politicians.

We similarly expect that COVID-19 policies from bipartisan coalitions of liberal and conservative elites will be supported more than policies from only liberal or conservative politicians. Ordinary people value political cooperation (41, 42) and are responsive to whether proposals are backed by trusted political elites (43, 44) . Previous research suggests that people are more swayed by the stances of their fellow ingroup than outgroup members (22, 23) , making it unlikely that the mere presence of outgroup politicians will completely dampen support for bipartisan policies. Examining policies proposed by bipartisan political coalitions thus allows us to assess whether bipartisan policies are supported similarly to ingroup policies, or if the presence of outgroup cues causes people to devalue those policies. We predict that both ordinary liberals and conservatives will support bipartisan-backed policies more than policies associated with the outgroup, given the presence of cues from trusted ingroup politicians.

Overview of Experiments. To test these predictions, we evaluated responses to COVID-19 management policies and the political groups that proposed them across seven democratic nations: Brazil, Israel, Italy, South Korea, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States (see SI Appendix, Table S2 ). To examine the generality of effect and respondents' sensitivity to the type of policy, we included two policies, one emphasizing public health and one emphasizing economic outcomes. We also evaluated responses to a COVID-19 vaccine distribution policy among US respondents in a follow-up experiment.

The COVID-19 pandemic provided an important context for three reasons. First, COVID-19 confronted nations worldwide with similar policy concerns at about the same time, minimizing cross-country confounding of policy domains. Second, polarized public responses to COVID-19 policies were plausibly unexpected given that shared threats that require coordinated action, like the pandemic, should reduce intergroup animosity and increase cooperation (20, 22, 23) . Also, because the coronavirus was novel, public opinion was not previously polarized on the issue. Finally, because most low-and middle-wealth countries require vaccine donations from wealthier nations to cover their vaccine needs (45) , US residents' attitudes toward the distribution of vaccines abroad can meaningfully affect the world's COVID-19 recovery efforts (46) . The second experiment allowed us to evaluate our hypotheses in a context involving a material good that is vital to global pandemic outcomes: the worldwide distribution of safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines. Table 1 . At least as much as liberals and conservatives had polarized attitudes toward COVID-19 policies, the direction and magnitude of those differences depended on whether the policies were proposed by liberal or conservative political elites. The depolarizing effect of nonpartisan experts and bipartisan political elites occurred across countries (Fig. 1B) . Compared with the overall effect across countries (B = 0.20), the depolarizing effect of expert and bipartisan policies was significantly larger in Sweden [B ¼ 0.37, F(1, 11,958) = 19.02, P < 0.001, η 2 p = 0.002], presumably because the polarizing effect of political cues was also larger in Sweden. These results suggest that across countries that vary on cultural, political, and demographic dimensions, foregrounding either liberal or conservative political elites polarizes public opinion whereas foregrounding experts and bipartisan coalitions prevents polarization. Affective polarization was correlated with policy support. Respondents' support for COVID-19 policy was regressed on their affect toward the group proposing the policy (using the average of affect toward liberal and conservative elites for bipartisan policies), controlling for political cue conditions, respondent partisan identification, and policy emphasis (see Table 2 ).* Respondents' policy support was significantly and positively predicted by their affect toward the policy proposer [B = 0.20, F(1, 10,707) = 413.19, P < 0.001, η 2 p = 0.037]. This effect emerged across countries, with the effect being somewhat larger in the United States [B = 0.25, F(1, 10,707) = 239.85, P < 0.001, η 2 p = 0.022] compared with the average effect across countries. Affective polarization helps explain why cues from political elites, nonpartisan experts, and bipartisan coalitions influence public support for COVID-19 policies. People support policies more when proposed by elites who they trust and toward whom they feel positive.

The findings thus far demonstrate that cues from partisan elites polarize public opinion toward COVID-19 policy across countries and that these polarizing effects are correlated with affective polarization. In a follow-up experiment, we examined how these polarizing effects might continue to pose challenges as societies confront global public health issues. Consider questions surrounding the distribution of vaccines that were developed and secured in wealthier countries such as the United States with limited distribution in poorer countries. In addition to the loss of life and economic activity in unvaccinated countries, unequal vaccine distribution increases the global risk of new, vaccine-resistant variants of the virus (45, 46) . US respondents were asked to read one of two policies regarding international vaccine distribution. An American prioritization policy stated that because the United States had led vaccine development, it "should be able to distribute vaccines to its people before sending vaccines to other countries." An internationally proportional policy stated that "other countries should not be punished for not having the means to fund vaccine trials" and that "vaccines should be distributed proportionally to country population size until 20% of each population is protected." , controlling for political cue manipulation, respondent partisan identification, and policy emphasis. These results demonstrate that the same processes that polarize public attitudes toward COVID-19 mitigation policies also influenced Americans' support for policies to combat COVID-19 globally through international vaccine distribution.

COVID-19 laid bare both the difficulty and importance of establishing and maintaining broad public support for policies to address the pandemic. The present findings suggest that the foregrounding of political elites triggered affective polarization and polarized public opinion to COVID-19 policies, not only in the United States but across a diverse range of countries. These polarizing effects occurred for COVID-19 containment policies, as well as, in the United States, policies about international COVID-19 vaccine distribution. Policies backed by bipartisan coalitions and nonpartisan experts precluded these polarizing effects by avoiding association only with outgroups.

The similarity of findings across these politically and culturally diverse countries, as well as across policy subjects in the United States, suggests that the influence of partisan elite cues and affective polarization are neither confined to the United States nor a function of a specific policy domain. Social-behavioral scientists should therefore look beyond US-centric processes such as its two-party system, ideological sorting, and uniquely polarized media (27) (28) (29) that do not readily explain polarizing effects in other countries. Although there may be some exceptional elements of political sectarianism (9) in the United States, the present results imply more widespread social, cognitive, and affective explanations for the polarizing influence of political elites.

The results provide suggestive evidence that affective polarization contributes to the polarizing effects of partisan elites. Importantly, measuring affective polarization before policy stances ensures that descriptions of policies could not have influenced affect (8) . Although it is possible that measuring affective polarization exacerbated the effects of political elite cues by priming intergroup animosity, studies in the United States have demonstrated comparably large effects of political cues without measuring affective polarization (19) (20) (21) . Future work could expand on these findings by experimentally manipulating affect orthogonal to political elite cues to better establish affect's causal role.

Future work might also expand the number and range of countries in a design with similar policy contexts and proposals. Although this study included a range of countries, four of the seven were individualistic, Western countries. Broader representation of non-Western, less-individualistic, less-wealthy countries would afford stronger tests of the generality of polarizing phenomena.

In demonstrating that expert sponsored policies are depolarized and widely supported, the present results stress the importance of maintaining trust in nonpartisan experts. The politicization of experts undermines their broad credibility (47, 48) , which has begun to erode among conservatives worldwide (35, 36) . Preserving scientists' and public health experts' nonpartisan status enables them to uphold their effectiveness in providing crucial guidance during crises like the COVID-19 pandemic.

In an interconnected world, shared threats of pandemics and other international crises will be increasingly common (49, 50) . Partisan elites create barriers to combatting these threats by polarizing public support for effective policies. These barriers can be overcome by foregrounding bipartisan coalitions and nonpartisan experts in public health communication.

The Institutional Review Board at the University of Colorado categorized the study as exempt (Protocol 20-0197). Respondents provided informed consent before completing the study. All materials, data, and analysis scripts are available on OSF, housed within the Political Cues folder: https://osf.io/ewr7g/.

Respondents. In the main experiment, we surveyed diverse national samples (n = 12,955) between 3 and 20 August 2020, from Brazil (n = 1,500), Israel (n = 1,958), Italy (n = 1,586), South Korea (n = 1,484), Sweden (n = 1,589), the United Kingdom (n = 1,520), and the United States (n = 3,318). Samples were drawn from online panels based in each of the seven countries. Sampling quotas for age and gender were used to select respondents and respondents were financially compensated for their participation, except in the Swedish sample. Surveys were completed online and administered in each country's official or national language. Surveys were adapted from English by the authors who are fluent in both English and the target language and who have expertise in the cultural and political contexts of each country (see OSF File 1 for more information on sampling method by country and sample descriptive statistics). In the follow-up experiment, we surveyed 2,463 respondents in the United States who had participated in the main experiment (of 3,346 eligible US respondents, a 73.6% recontact rate) from 30 October to 15 November 2020. ‡ Policy Emphasis Manipulation. In the main experiment, respondents were randomly assigned to evaluate one of two policies to manage the COVID-19 pandemic. Both policies specified social distancing and lockdowns. The public health policy emphasized public health goals, which included more severe restrictions and an 18-mo lockdown that focused "primarily on keeping COVID-19 case numbers down." The economic policy emphasized "recovery of the economy as much as possible while preventing a resurgence in COVID-19 cases," with fewer restrictions and a 6-mo lockdown.

In the follow-up experiment, respondents were randomly assigned to evaluate one of two policies regarding international vaccine distribution. The American prioritization policy stated that because the United States had led vaccine development it "should be able to distribute vaccines to its people before sending vaccines to other countries." The internationally proportional policy stated that "other countries should not be punished for not having the Politicians polarize and experts depolarize public support for COVID-19 management policies across countries means to fund vaccine trials" and that "vaccines should be distributed proportionally to country population size until 20% of each population is protected."

Political Cues Manipulation. For both experiments, we crossed the policy emphasis manipulation with the political identity of the policy's proposal group. Respondents read a policy proposed by one of four partisan proposal groups: liberal elites, conservative elites, a bipartisan coalition of liberal and conservative elites, or relevant experts including the World Health Organization. Liberal and conservative elites were defined within each country, for example, Democrats versus Republicans in the United States, politicians from the progressive opposition versus the conservative government in Brazil, and Social Democratic versus Moderate politicians in Sweden. Specific politicians were named among party elites in all countries except in Israel and South Korea, where the framing effects were comparable to the overall effect (see SI Appendix , Table S1 for list of political groups by country; see OSF File 2 for the full text of US policy stimuli).

Measures. Respondents indicated how much they supported the overall policy and four specific policy components: social distancing, workplace regulations, contact tracing, and travel regulations (À3 = strongly oppose, +3 = strongly support), which we averaged into an index of policy support (α = 0.89).

Respondents indicated their partisan identification with the relevant political groups in their country using two branched questions as in previous papers (51) . We used these responses to categorize respondents, including leaners, as Liberal, Conservative, or Centrist.

Affective polarization measures were collected before the presentation of the COVID-19 policy and the political cues manipulation. To measure affective polarization, respondents reported their affect toward three groups: liberal elites, conservative elites, and experts. They reported trust (À3 = strongly distrust, +3 = strongly trust), liking (À3 = strongly dislike, +3 = strongly like), and temperature (À3 = very cold, +3 = very warm). We averaged these responses into a composite measure for each target (α = 0.90, 0.92, and 0.87, respectively).

Data Analysis. Analyses were conducted using R version 4.0.2. We analyzed data with multiple linear regressions using contrast-coded predictors, their interactions, and fixed effect deviation coding to compare each country to the overall mean (see SI Appendix, Table S3 for contrast codes). Degrees of freedom vary across analyses due to missing data.

Data Availability. Survey data have been deposited in OSF (https://osf.io/ ewr7g/?view_only).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS. Two reviewers provided insightful comments on the manuscript. NSF Division of Social and Economic Sciences Grant 2029183 supported this research.

The effect of large-scale anti-contagion policies on the COVID-19 pandemic

Evaluating the initial impact of COVID-19 containment measures on economic activity

Politicization and polarization in COVID-19 news coverage

How affective polarization shapes Americans' political beliefs: A study of response to the COVID-19 pandemic

Political polarization on COVID-19 pandemic response in the United States

Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

Behavioural, environmental, social, and systems interventions against covid-19

Affective polarization, local contexts and public opinion in America

Political sectarianism in America

The origins and consequences of affective polarization in the United States

Political polarization in the American public

Media and political polarization

Rediscovering the Social Group: A Self-Categorization Theory

Human Groups and Social Categories

Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government

I disrespectfully agree": The differential effects of partisan sorting on social and issue polarization

The Bias That Divides Us: The Science and Politics of Myside Thinking

Party over policy: The dominating impact of group influence on political beliefs

Elite influence on public attitudes about climate policy

The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion

Partisan barriers to bipartisanship: Understanding climate policy polarization

Psychological barriers to bipartisan public support for climate policy

Toward surmounting the psychological barriers to climate policy-appreciating contexts and acknowledging challenges: A reply to Weber

The role of race and ethnicity in climate change polarization: Evidence from a US national survey experiment

Which parties can lead opinion? Experimental evidence on partisan cue taking in multiparty democracies

The Partisan Sort: How Liberals Became Democrats and Conservatives Became Republicans

Sorting the news: How ranking by popularity polarizes our politics

Polarization: What Everyone Needs to Know

Measuring partisanship as a social identity in multiparty systems

Expressive versus instrumental partisanship in multiparty European systems

Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation: The Robbers Cave Experiment (University Book Exchange

Cross-country trends in affective polarization

American Affective Polarization in Comparative Perspective

Trust and mistrust in Americans' views of scientific experts

The gateway belief model: A largescale replication

Source expertise, source attractiveness, and the processing of persuasive information: A functional approach

Better liked than right: Trustworthiness and expertise as factors in credibility

Matching versus mismatching attitude functions: Implications for scrutiny of persuasive messages

Science and scientists held in high esteem across global publics

Public preferences for bipartisanship in the policymaking process

Partisan co-alignment and perceptions of public probity

How trust matters: The changing political relevance of political trust

If They Endorse It, Can't trust it: How outgroup leader endorsements undercut public support for civil war peace settlements

Lancet Commission on COVID-19 Vaccines and Therapeutics Task Force Members, Urgent needs of low-income and middle-income countries for COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics

Global dashboard for vaccine equity: vaccine access" (United Nations Development Programme

When scientists politicize science: Making sense of controversy over The Skeptical Environmentalist

Policy making during crises: How diversity and disagreement can help manage the politics of expert advice

The Lancet Planetary Health, A pandemic era

Workshop report on biodiversity and pandemics of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services

Perceiving political polarization in the United States: Party identity strength and attitude extremity exacerbate the perceived partisan divide