Thread by @decustecu

Excited to see our paper with @mapickup out in @Res_Pol today.

A lot of attention (justifiably!) has been focused on the role of partisanship in COVID attitudes and behaviors. We expand the scope by looking at populism, which cuts across the party lines.

#SocSciResearch

We focus on two dimensions of populism: anti-elite dimension and distrust of experts dimension.

They are distributed fairly evenly among Reps and Dems. Republicans tend to score higher on the distrust of experts dimension of populism and Democrats on the anti-elite dimension.

We find that both dimensions of populist attitudes are independently strong predictors of believing in two COVID related conspiracy theories: believing that COVID is a Chinese bioweapon and that a vaccine already exists (this is based on a survey conducted on March 31, 2020).

We also find that populists, in general, are more likely to consume right wing news media outlets and the consumption of conservative news is particularly prevalent among Democrats who are high on populist attitudes.

We show that consumption of conservative news content (which, in the early days of the pandemic featured a lot of misinformation and conspiratorial content) is particularly impactful on those scoring high in populist attitudes.

Finally, we find that these conspiracy beliefs have real-world consequences on COVID-19 related behaviors. This, we think, has implications of how to communicate COVID related health messages to these folks. A lot of the focus on partisan divisions misses the populist Democrats!

We rely heavily in this paper on the work of @CasMudde @BDStanley @EricMerkley @ProfEricOliver @matt_motta @CFarhart and many other excellent scholars who have tackled these issues.

You can find the open-source article over at @Res_Pol: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…

cc @SFU_polisci @ColoradoStateU @CSUPoliSci

cc @byrd_nick @CaulfieldTim