Partisan policy lockdown and the salience of health

Ianni, Antonella (2022) Partisan policy lockdown and the salience of health

Record type: Monograph (Discussion Paper)

Abstract

Salience theory suggests that the relative perception of the ensuing
trade-o s between Health and Wealth is likely to have been affected during
the Covid19 pandemic - with agents facing significant choices between health
precautionary measures and economic prosperity generated by working in active
lines of business. This paper investigates some of the implications this has for
electoral competition.
We incorporate health salience in an otherwise standard spatial model of
electoral competition between policy motivated candidates, and investigate the
effects on equilibrium platforms of the internalization of the attention externality
that stems from salient behaviour on the part of voters. Following an increase
in voters' health-salience, the model predicts that the response of a lockdown
averse party is over and above what motivated by fundamentals, and also in
excess of the response that a lockdown inclined party would have taken facing
the same fundamentals. Also, platform polarization decreases.
We validate the results empirically by constructing a novel dataset of US
data over the first Covid19 wave. In addition to standard observables, we gauge
salience by performing linguistic text analysis on a large set of Twitter data. We
show that all econometric specific cations are broadly in line with the theoretical
results.