Affective Polarization Turns 'The Country' Into 'Trump' in COVID Ratings

Why This Matters

Affective polarization—partisans’ dislike and distrust of the political out-group—has risen to historic highs in the United States. While prior work links this hostility to nonpolitical behaviors (dating, consumer choices), James N. Druckman, Samara Klar, Yanna Krupnikov, Matthew Levendusky, and John Barry Ryan investigate whether partisan animus also reshapes political beliefs about ostensibly neutral institutions and national responses.

What the Authors Ask

Do Americans who feel strong animus toward the other party politicize evaluations of apolitical targets—specifically, do they treat the abstract label “the United States” as synonymous with the incumbent administration when judging the COVID-19 response? The authors test whether affective polarization, apart from party identification, alters how people interpret and evaluate such targets.

How the Study Works

• The authors pair pre-pandemic, exogenous measures of affective polarization with a survey experiment about the COVID-19 response. Using measures of partisan animus collected before the pandemic avoids conflating polarization with pandemic-era experiences.
• The experimental manipulation varied the target that respondents evaluated (for example, phrasing that referenced the “United States’ response” versus the “Trump administration’s response”), allowing the researchers to observe whether partisan hostility leads respondents to collapse neutral national language into partisan actors.

Key Findings

• Respondents with high levels of affective polarization did not meaningfully distinguish evaluations of the “United States’” COVID-19 response from evaluations of the Trump administration’s response—treating the nation’s response as if it were the incumbent party’s performance.
• Less affectively polarized partisans, by contrast, evaluated the country’s response more independently from their views of the administration.
• These patterns hold even when accounting for partisanship itself, indicating that affective polarization exerts an independent influence on substantive political beliefs.

What This Means For Political Behavior

The results show that partisan animus can reshape citizens’ perceptions of ostensibly neutral political targets, turning national institutions or collective actors into extensions of the opposing party. This has consequences for how information about government performance is interpreted and for efforts to build cross-partisan consensus on policy issues.