Ideology and compliance with health guidelines during the COVID‐19 pandemic: A comparative perspective
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Abstract
Objective
We measure the prevalence of noncompliance with public health guidelines in the COVID‐19 pandemic and examine how it is shaped by political ideology across countries.
Methods
A list experiment of noncompliance and a multi‐item scale of health‐related behaviors were embedded in a comparative survey of 11,000 respondents in nine OCED countries. We conduct a statistical analysis of the list experiment capturing degrees of noncompliance with social distancing rules and estimate ideological effect heterogeneity. A semiparametric analysis examines the functional form of the relationship between ideology and the propensity to violate public health guidelines.
Results
Our analyses reveal substantial heterogeneity between countries. Ideology plays an outsized role in the United States. No association of comparable magnitude is found in the majority of the other countries in our study. In many settings, the impact of ideology on health‐related behaviors is nonlinear.
Conclusion
Our results highlight the importance of taking a comparative perspective. Extrapolating the role of ideology from the United States to other advanced industrialized societies might paint an erroneous picture of the scope of possible nonpharmaceutical interventions. Heterogeneity limits the extent to which policymakers can learn from experiences across borders.
Article activity feed
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.07.29.20164806: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Our macro-level results illustrate that social distancing appears to be more difficult to maintain when the immediate health impact of the pandemic is comparatively mild and/or broader limitations on movement and external sanctions are moderate rather than very strict. While we interpret these results with caution, they underscore the challenge for policymakers trying to open up the economy and society while maintaining behavioral measures that …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.07.29.20164806: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Our macro-level results illustrate that social distancing appears to be more difficult to maintain when the immediate health impact of the pandemic is comparatively mild and/or broader limitations on movement and external sanctions are moderate rather than very strict. While we interpret these results with caution, they underscore the challenge for policymakers trying to open up the economy and society while maintaining behavioral measures that limit the emergence of subsequent outbreaks. Compared to direct survey questions, the list experimental approach makes our findings less susceptible to measurement errors induced by social desirability bias that have been prominently discussed in the literature. A potential limitation of our experiment is its external validity—understood as the scope of actions captured by the experiment, which focuses on meeting friends or relatives. To study this limitation, we have constructed latent variable models of individuals’ propensity to enact behavioral changes during the pandemic. We analyzed seven direct questions on a range of behaviors, such as more frequent hand washing, or avoiding public places (see OA B). Both a pooled item response theory model and a random coefficients hierarchical factor model, which allows for country-specific response processes, show that a single component explains most of the variation in responses. Reassuringly, there is a strong positive rank correlation between list experimental estimates and country value...
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
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