Polarized Politics: Protest Against COVID-19 Containment Policies in the USA

Abstract

Abstract Protest against containment policies in U.S. states is fueled by two drivers: the stringency of containment policies and the partisan control over the governorship and legislatures in each state. In our analysis of the period from March 2020 to March 2022, we find more protest events in states fully controlled by Democrats than in Republican controlled states both in a sample consisting of all states and a balanced sample in which we constrain observations to those red and blue states with on average similarly stringent containment policies. Protest was therefore politicized, and we find that partisanship exerts a roughly equal substantive effect on the number of protest events as the stringency of containment policies. If we assume no direct effect of partisanship on protest but allow for causal heterogeneity along partisan lines in the effect of containment policies, we find that the same increase in the stringency of policies evokes a stronger protest response in blue states than in red states.