Partisanship and the Pandemic

In March 2020, Shana Kushner Gadarian, professor and chair of political science, joined a team of scholars to survey 3,000 Americans on their attitudes and behaviors relating to the emerging issue of coronavirus. The study revealed stark differences in respondents, but not based on any typical factors.

“It wasn’t about people’s risk perception or how many COVID-19 cases were in their geographic area,” says Gadarian. “It wasn’t about age or occupation. The overriding characteristic that differentiated people was their partisan identities.”

The researchers went on to interview the same group five more times over the course of a year, and they found that the partisan gap changed very little. These findings, which helped Gadarian earn a 2021 Carnegie Fellowship, will be published next year in the book Pandemic Politics: How COVID-19 Revealed the Depths of Partisan Polarization (Princeton University Press), co-written with Sara Wallace Goodman and Thomas Pepinski.

“Health doesn’t happen separately from politics,” Gadarian says. “Public health knows a great deal about how to message on issues of health and medical best practices. But we also need to think about the other signals that people are getting, particularly the politics, and how to work with or around them.”

The team will explore a range of factors in the five-year study, including the effects of vaccine availability and uptake; racial, ethnic and income disparities; and the role of school and neighborhood resources in shaping outcomes.

Another NIH-funded faculty project will investigate the challenges for adult children caring for aging parents during the pandemic. Emily Wiemers, associate professor of public administration and international affairs, is leading the two-year project in collaboration with researchers at Bowling Green State University, UCLA and Duke.

“We’re studying how intergenerational help changed during COVID, because of course face-to-face interactions became riskier, and also the substitutes for that help—like formal care and Meals on Wheels—stopped, at least for a time,” says Wiemers, who is also a researcher at the Aging Studies Institute and Center for Policy Research. “So, we’re exploring how family members made up the gap, or whether there were needs for older adults that didn’t get filled.”

Beyond its impact on physical health, the pandemic has had profound psychological effects. Rates of drug overdose and suicide rose—although only in certain places and among certain groups, according to Shannon Monnat, associate professor of sociology, Lerner Chair for Public Health Promotion and director of the Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion. At the same time, states took widely varying approaches to controlling the spread of COVID (through measures such as mask mandates, business closures and stay-at-home orders) and lessening the effects of these restrictions (through extended unemployment benefits and eviction moratoria, for instance).

“These policies varied all across the U.S., both in terms of whether the state implemented them and how long they were in effect, and in some cases the level of generosity,” says Monnat. “So, it creates a natural experiment to understand whether state policies had any effect on psychological health, drug overdose and suicide.”

That connection between policy and psychological health is the focus of a five-year study led by Monnat and funded by a $1.95 million grant from the NIH. The research uses data collected through a national survey on well-being conducted through the Lerner Center. Several Maxwell scholars are co-investigators, including Wiemers; Jennifer Karas Montez, University Professor and director of the Center for Aging and Policy Studies; and Douglas Wolf, Gerald B. Cramer Professor of Aging Studies and professor of public administration and international affairs.

“Understanding how those variations affect different outcomes during the pandemic is really important,” says Monnat, “and ideally it will help to inform policies during the next pandemic.”

Thinking On The Ground

Conversations with faculty about COVID-related research quickly reveal connections to work by Maxwell colleagues across the social sciences and public affairs. Research hubs such as the Lerner Center, Aging Studies Institute, Center for Policy Research and Campbell Public Affairs Institute facilitate collaborations across disciplines, too, and help share the fruits of research with policymakers and the public.

In addition to the collaborative research underway, an upcoming conference will highlight Maxwell faculty work on the pandemic. As part of her Carnegie grant for the book Pandemic Politics (see sidebar), Shana Kushner Gadarian, professor and chair of political science, is planning a conference on COVID research in spring 2023, facilitated by the Campbell Institute. “Part of the plan is to bring people in from the outside,” she says, “but also to highlight the many colleagues here at Maxwell who have been doing work on COVID-19.”

Colleen Heflin noted that the confluence of Maxwell research on the pandemic makes her own work much more rewarding.

“We’re all looking at a different piece of the puzzle,” she says. “At Maxwell we do high, rigorous research, but we like to do it with application. We’re trying to change how things work on the ground. Our campus has a real strength in this area, and I think it makes us well-placed to have an impact in policy and implementation during this critical time.”

Supporting the Elderly

As a Ph.D. student in sociology and graduate fellow with the Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion, Claire Pendergrast does research on community-based agencies that support older adults living at home, providing services that became particularly critical during the pandemic.

Last spring, she published a paper and a research brief on New York aging networks’ responses to COVID and sent them to the Association on Aging in New York—which in turn shared her findings with state senator Rachel May, chair of the Committee on Aging. In July, Pendergrast testified at a senate hearing about the importance of “building local infrastructure to equip older adults to age in place and avoid more restrictive, costly and often unwanted institutional care.”

For Pendergrast, who now is interning in May’s office, the hearing was a gratifying chance to bridge research and policy. “The reason I’m studying these organizations,” she says, “is to understand if they’re effective and how we can do better to help older adults be healthy and independent.”