Professional Partisans? Primary Care Physicians, State Governments, and COVID-19 Responsibility and Response

Abstract

Abstract Emerging health crises challenge and overwhelm federal political systems (Greer et al. 2020, Global Public Health 15: 1413–6). Within the context of COVID-19, states and governors took charge in the absence of a coordinated federal response. The result was uneven policy responses and variance in health-related and economic outcomes. While existing research has explored public evaluations of state COVID-19 policies, we explore primary care physicians’ trust in state government for handling the pandemic, as well as their evaluations of their state government’s treatment responsibility for the pandemic and their state’s policy response. We find that general preferences for the role of the federal/state government in addressing the pandemic are shaped by individual-level physician partisanship. Specific evaluations of state policy responsiveness are influenced by whether physicians’ partisan preferences matched their governor. We also find, however, that Republican physicians were critical of Republican governors and physicians were less partisan than the general public. At least within public health, there are limits to the influence of partisan identity on expert (physician) political evaluations.