CORONAVIRUS
Does gender explain support for COVID-19 policies?
Scientific knowledge increases support for COVID-19 containment policy among women, not men.
The onset of the 2019 Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic revealed a distinct lack of preparation and decisive intervention by the world’s governments. In the United States alone and as of August 2020, there have been over 5.12 million documented cases resulting in over 163,000 deaths. This toll on human life has clearly illustrated the need to implement policies to prevent the spread of the virus.
Despite the risks posed by COVID-19 and the struggle by all levels of American government to contain the virus, the mass public’s perceptions and beliefs about COVID-19 and related containment policies are mixed. Moreover, Democratic and Republican partisans in the mass public and elected office have often taken contrasting views on what the government’s role in containing the virus should be — this being most clearly illustrated by the antagonism between Democratic governors and President Donald Trump.
Given the lack of understanding of how the mass public is responding to unprecedented governmental proposals to contain the pandemic, we explore the extent to which gender interacts with scientific knowledge in shaping attitudes toward government containment policies in the American public. We also explore how this interactive effect influences Democrats and Republicans differently, given the vast amount of political science literature showing divergence in policy preferences between the two parties in this era of polarization.
Our research, published in the special COVID-19 issue in the journal Politics & Gender, uses the Pew American Trends Panel survey to assess whether scientific knowledge and gender influence the propensity of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents to support COVID-19 containment policies. Specifically, we rely on two survey waves, the first measuring scientific knowledge and the second measuring support for government restrictions on the following activities:
- International travel
- Most businesses (except grocery stores & pharmacies)
- Large gatherings greater than 10 people
- Major sporting & entertainment events
- K–12 schooling
- Restaurant Dining
- Upcoming state primary elections
Respondents were surveyed early in the pandemic, between March 19th–24th, 2020. Figure 1 shows that, at the beginning of the pandemic, Democrats were more likely to support all restrictions than Republicans and Independents. However, it is important to note that all of these groups overwhelmingly supported most efforts by the government to restrict activities in light of the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the entire survey, 79% of all respondents supported restricting at least 6 out of 7 activities.
While simple differences in policy support between these groups is interesting, our research is more concerned with the underlying influences of gender and scientific knowledge within each of these groups. To investigate these possible effects, we model, using a logistic regression, the support of each of these restriction policies as a function of scientific knowledge, conditioned by gender and party ID. We also specify a measure of latent support for containment policies by using a technique called Item Response Theory (IRT). This allows us to assess support for all of these policies on a single scale where one end represents a distinct lack of support for any policy and the other being full support of all containment policies.
First, we find strong evidence that scientific knowledge, regardless of party ID or gender has a large and positive effect on support for containment policies. More importantly, we find a “gender gap” in that the effect of scientific knowledge on containment policy support is much larger for women, regardless of party. In other words, when women possess the scientific knowledge necessary to understand the risks of COVID-19, they are much more likely to support containment policies than men with the same level of knowledge or anyone with lower knowledge.
One example of this gender gap is shown in Figure 2, which shows the effect of scientific knowledge (X-axis) and gender (lines) by Party ID (panels) in the context of closing down in-person K–12 instruction. As shown, scientific knowledge increases the probability of supporting this policy at a higher rate for women. By contrast, greater scientific knowledge does not increase the probability of supporting this restriction policy among men in the full sample, Republican men, or even Democratic men. In the 24 models evaluated, we find that knowledge significantly increases the support of government restrictions in 13 models for women and only a single model for men.
We attribute this finding to the body of literature that has found that women have a much higher degree of compassion and empathy informing their policy positions than men (Schlesinger & Heldman 2001). In the context of COVID-19, our research complements Shay’s (2020) findings at the elite level showing that state female health commissioners were more likely to implement stay-at-home orders earlier than their male counterparts, even after controlling for partisanship.
We believe that we make two major contributions.
First, we find that while women have, on average, lower levels of scientific knowledge, when they do possess the knowledge necessary to understand the dangers of COVID-19 they support containment policies above and beyond their male counterparts.
Second, we contribute to the broader literature on how partisanship influences views on the government’s role in managing national disasters more broadly and national public health emergencies more specifically.
Since the pandemic presents a new set of “hard” issues that are both politically unfamiliar and involve matters of medical and epidemiological expertise, we believe that our research also speaks to how citizens can formulate new beliefs on the role of government in confronting new, rapidly involving, calamities. We hope our research contributes to our collective understanding of how scientific knowledge and gender can help garner support for government policies during a catastrophic public health crisis.
