Do tweets like this mean that people respond to a viral disease along political lines? Here’s some evidence for why the answer might yes… (1/10) https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1232058127740174339

Ex: Days before Hurricane Irma made landfall in Sept 2017, several conservative media outlets claimed the severity of the hurricane was exaggerated by liberals to the 'climate change agenda.' Did people respond to this reporting based on their political party? (2/10)

Long, @MKeithChen, @rarohla explored this in “Political Storms: Emergent Partisan Skepticism of Hurricane Risks,” finding that this reporting decreased evacuation rates for conservative districts significantly more than liberal districts. (3/10)

https://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty_pages/keith.chen/papers/WP_Hurricanes_and_Appendix.pdf

“Combining a large GPS dataset for 2.7 million smartphone users in Florida and Texas with U.S. Census demographic data and 2016 U.S. Presidential election precinct-level results, we empirically examine hurricane evacuation behavior … (4/10)

... A difference-in-differences analysis demonstrates that Trump/Clinton vote share strongly predicts evacuation rates, but only after the emergence of conservative-media dismissals of hurricane warnings in September 2017.” (5/10)

The authors argue for causality bc the trend emerges only after statements from conservative media outlets and did not occur for hurricanes Harvey or Matthew. Results are robust to geographic clustering, definition of evacuation, and unobservable selection (Oster 2019). (6/10)

Turning to coronavirus, we may see a similar trend if this becomes more serious. The threat posed by the disease is still very uncertain, and consequently so is the appropriate course of action. Idk the answer to this. (7/10)

The thing that sticks with me is that our country is now so polarized that politics spills over into how individuals respond to major events like a viral disease or a natural disaster. (8/10)

And the mechanism appears to be the media that individuals choose to consume. The decision about what and whom we listen to means that we can live different completely different realities, to the point where a hurricane or endemic could be nonexistent or imminent. (9/10)

So be deliberate and intentional and mindful about the media you choose to consume. And wash your f*$king hands! (10/10)

Please see the above thread. These kinds of statements are dangerous bc they impact how people respond to disasters/pandemics. (11/10) https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1237027356314869761

Didn't want to keep adding to this, but "coronavirus impeachment scam" is too On Point for this thread (12/10) https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/1237174846355841024

[1 Month Later]

...and here is the working paper from a team of Economists from NYU, Stanford, and Harvard that came out today that does exactly this. https://twitter.com/nberpubs/status/1249716123597185025

[1 week later]
My colleague Brendan Moore sent me this paper, which uses the time of sunset as an IV for whether a county watches Tucker Carlson or Hannity on Fox, and then to predict different behavior during social distancing as a result. https://bfi.uchicago.edu/working-paper/2020-44/

Three reasons this is important:
1) This builds on previous research showing how the response to a crisis can be different along political lines and does so within two conservative TV programs (Tucker Carlson v. Hannity; not Republican v. Democrat).

2) In doing #1, this research emphasizes the role of media as the mechanism driving the differences in behavior. It is harder to argue here that this trend is actually driven by differences in underlying political beliefs or demographics than in earlier studies.

3) This paper links the different behavior to differences in infection and mortality rates, which is what I think we should ultimately care about.

The important causal chain at the heart of this thread:
Political Beliefs -> Media consumed -> Crisis response -> Health outcomes

***Spoiler Alert: The people who took COVID-19 seriously inspired viewers to take social distancing seriously, and these counties are seeing fewer infections/deaths.