Messaging Mask Wearing During the COVID-19 Crisis: Ideological Differences

As the U.S. Government works to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, messaging is important in getting individuals to comply with public health recommendations, especially as the response from the public seems to be polarized along partisan and ideological lines. Using a recent Centers for Dise...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of experimental political science Vol. 8; no. 2; pp. 91 - 101
Main Author Utych, Stephen M.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published New York, USA Cambridge University Press 01.01.2021
Subjects
Conservatism
Coronaviruses
COVID-19
Disease control
Ideology
Masks
Partisanship
Political science
Preregistered Report
Prevention
Public health
United States > US
COVID-19
ideology
regulatory focus theory
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Summary:As the U.S. Government works to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, messaging is important in getting individuals to comply with public health recommendations, especially as the response from the public seems to be polarized along partisan and ideological lines. Using a recent Centers for Disease Control recommendation of wearing facemasks, I use Regulatory Focus Theory to predict that conservatives will be more responsive to messages related to promotion, while liberals are more responsive to messages related to prevention. Using a pre-registered experimental design, I find no evidence that prevention messages influence attitudes toward mask wearing. Promotion messages, however, cause conservatives to become less supportive of mask wearing, in contrast to theoretical predictions. These findings suggest that, related to messaging about mask wearing, strong ideological differences do not emerge related to the focus of the message.
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The data, code, and any additional materials required to replicate all analyses in this article are available at the Journal of Experimental Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/MIIXNG.
ISSN:2052-2630
2052-2649
DOI:10.1017/XPS.2020.15