The Conditional Effects of Authoritarianism on COVID-19 Pandemic Health Behaviors and Policy Preferences

A large literature contends that conservatives differ from liberals in their dispositional sensitivity to threat and needs for social order and security. Thus, a puzzle emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic when American conservatives, despite their purported threat sensitivity, responded to the pandemic in ways that evinced little concern toward the risks posed by COVID-19. Threat tolerant liberals present an equally interesting case, having fervently masked, isolated, and advocated for stringent public health restrictions when facing down COVID-19. Why did so many Americans adopt health behaviors and policy preferences at odds with their dispositional orientations toward threat and needs for security during the COVID-19 pandemic? In this paper, I analyze three national surveys to evaluate how psychological dispositions affected Americans’ responses to COVID-19. I find that authoritarianism, a common measure of dispositional threat sensitivity and needs for security, conditionally affected Americans’ responses to the pandemic. Directly, authoritarianism was associated with greater concern over COVID-19 and, in turn, increased willingness to engage in protective health behaviors, support restrictive public health measures, and support economic interventions amidst the pandemic-induced downturn. Indirectly, however, authoritarianism promoted identification with and cue-taking from right-wing elites who frequently downplayed the severity of COVID-19; attention to such rhetoric reduced politically engaged authoritarians’ concern over COVID-19 and, in turn, their willingness to adopt protective health behaviors and support public health restrictions or economic interventionism. Attention to political discourse thus appears to have countervailed Americans’ dispositional orientations toward threat and security during the COVID-19 pandemic.