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Will I Get COVID-19? Partisanship, Social Media Frames, and Perceptions of Health Risk in Brazil

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2020

Ernesto Calvo Open the ORCID record for Ernesto Calvo [Opens in a new window]  and
Tiago Ventura Open the ORCID record for Tiago Ventura [Opens in a new window]
Ernesto Calvo
Affiliation:
Ernesto Calvo is a professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA. ecalvo@umd.edu.
Tiago Ventura
Affiliation:
Tiago Ventura is a Ph.D. candidate in government and politics at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA. venturat@umd.edu.
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Abstract

In these polarized and challenging times, not even perceptions of personal risk are immune to partisanship. This article introduces results from a new survey with an embedded social media experiment conducted during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil. Descriptive results show that progovernment and opposition partisans report very different expectations of health and job risks. Job and health policy have become wedge issues that elicit partisan responses. The analysis exploits random variation in the survey recruitment to show the effects of the president’s first speech on national television on the perceived risk and the moderating effect of partisanship. The article presents a framing experiment that models key cognitive mechanisms driving partisan differences in perceptions of health risks and job security during the COVID-19 crisis.

Keywords

PartisanshipCOVID-19social media frameshealth risk
Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Politics and Society , Volume 63 , Issue 1 , February 2021 , pp. 1 - 26
Copyright
© The Authors, 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the University of Miami

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Footnotes

Conflict of interest: The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest.

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