Tracking U.S. Response to COVID-19: Trust, Information Acquisition, and Inequalities

The COVID-19 pandemic upended social, economic, and political systems throughout the world. The United States has faced particular challenges for at least three reasons. First, the U.S. is extremely heterogeneous in terms of social groups and economic inequities. The pandemic divided the country leaving the well-off to create microcosm worlds shielded from first-hand visions of the pandemic's impact while leaving others vulnerable to the disease, and in dire situations due to dense living conditions and business shutdowns. Second, the federal nature of the U.S. led to dramatically uneven policy responses across states, resulting in huge variations in the impact across space. Third, perhaps more than any other country, COVID-19 became politicized in the U.S., dividing Democrats and Republicans at both the elite and mass levels. This proposal seeks to extend data from the ongoing COVID States project, a large-scale data collection that includes over-time data from diverse state-level samples. The existing data provide information about state-level policy support, behavioral adaptation, health, economic well-being, mental health, information/misperceptions, racial attitudes, political attitudes, and more. It also contains detailed social network batteries that allow for the study of inter-household and inter-group transmission of the disease and information. This is complemented by Twitter data from nearly 20,000 survey respondents that allow for the identification of misinformation sharing and the study of political discourse. While these data offer a detailed depiction of events and reactions to COVID-19, they provide little insight into the downstream consequences for democracy and society. This proposal is to collect post-pandemic data from the same time series - including empaneled respondents from whom there are responses over the course of the pandemic. This provides an unprecedented opportunity for novel over-time and across-space research designs. The project will study, for example, how pandemic experiences ultimately affect trust in institutions, information and misperceptions, and economic and health inequalities.