This summer, I have been team teaching a Global Issues class on COVID-19 with a multidisciplinary team of faculty at the College of Coastal Georgia. We have, along with our students, been exploring the COVID-19 pandemic from every angle with professors from across the College’s disciplines: psychological impacts, economic impacts, the biological origins of the virus, challenges in health informatics, and many more. My lecture for the class this week focuses on the socio-political changes and challenges that have emerged in the midst of the pandemic. In simpler terms, what’s going on with the government, laws, policies, and social norms in our American society right now? One trend we can observe is different attitudes toward government according to one’s political ideology.
When I am talking to students about political ideology, I try to make it clear that one’s ideology is not the same as one’s political party affiliation. Ideology is a spectrum ranging from conservative to liberal and statist to libertarian; political parties tend to fall within the ranges of these different ideologies, but not perfectly. When analyzing or predicting the way certain parties might approach a policy, however, we can generally look to the liberal/conservative ideological positions to get a good idea of what to expect. What I found in researching my Global Issues lecture topic, however, is that attitudes about how well the federal government is doing during the COVID-19 crisis is not following political ideology, but rather party loyalty.
In 2010, under the Obama administration, Pew Research Center asked Americans in a large-scale survey how they felt the Federal Government was doing. Then, in May of 2020 under the Trump Administration, the progressive thinktank Data for Progress asked the exact same questions in order to generate comparisons. We would predict that in general, conservatives would favor smaller government and more state control. Likewise, we would predict that liberals would favor greater big-government intervention. Interestingly, the surveys revealed something different.
When liberals and conservatives were asked “Is the federal government having a positive or negative effect on the way things are going in the country,” there was a major reversal on the part of conservatives. While in 2010 77% of conservative respondents said the effect of the federal government on the country is negative, this dropped to just 32% in 2020 while the view of liberals remained stable at around 55%. Similarly, when asked “All in all, how good a job does the federal government do running its programs,” conservatives had a large 27-point drop where liberals had just a 10-point increase. Finally, when asked what level of government they trusted more to handle he pandemic, 37% of liberals trusted the federal government more than their local government versus 64% of conservatives. In other words, while we would expect a certain outcome based on traditional ideological stances – liberals favoring big government, conservatives favoring small government – we are seeing something different that speaks more to party affiliation and loyalty.
There could be a variety of reasons for this outcome, but what seems clear is that respondents, and especially conservative respondents, are equating the federal government with the President. Their support for that institution, therefore, seems to depend much more heavily on who is in office than on their attitude toward national government in general. The effect is that policy development and analysis cannot rely solely on ideological predictions. Instead, consideration of party loyalty has to be accounted for as well, which is a much more challenging and fluid metric.
Dr. Heather Farley is a professor of Public Management in the School of Business and Public Management at College of Coastal Georgia and Chair of the Department of Criminal Justice, Public Policy & Management. She is an associate of the College’s Reg Murphy Center for Economic and Policy Studies.
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