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Counties that have experienced at least one death from Covid-19 are more likely to comply with social distancing guidelines, as one might expect. Grades are also higher in counties where residents have higher income, more education, and lower rates of unemployment (measured prior to the crisis).
Perhaps unsurprisingly, politics and civic engagement bear a strong relationship to social distancing behavior. Higher levels of social capital — a combination of voter turnout in federal elections, response rates in the 2010 census, the number of associations and the number of nonprofits per capita — is associated with more social distancing. By contrast, counties with the greatest share of votes for Trump in the 2016 election were least likely to practice social distancing. And the greater the share of residents who disagreed with the statement that global warming is happening, the worse the county’s grade received in the Social Distancing Scoreboard.
All of these characteristics of counties are intertwined in complex ways, which means the patterns in the chart are meaningful only in a superficial way. And some of the variation across counties might simply be driven by differences in behavior in blue and red states, where governors have taken more or less aggressive approaches to encouraging social distancing. To push further, it is useful to consider all of these county factors together, and to analyze variation in social distancing among counties within the same states.
To do so, I carried out a regression analysis with all of the county-level measures and including fixed effects for states — this approach means that the analysis focuses only on variation among counties within the same states. (I should note that the results are virtually identical if I get rid of the state fixed effects and make comparisons among all counties across the nation.)
When all variables are included in the same model, I find counties that have experienced a death from Covid-19 exhibit higher levels of social distancing, but counties with more cases exhibit lower levels. Counties with larger populations, with more educated residents, and with higher percentages of white and Hispanic residents tend to receive higher grades on social distancing, while the age structure, the median income, and the unemployment rate are no longer associated with social distancing behavior.
Social distancing grades rise with the level of social capital in a county, and grades fall with the percentage of the county voters who cast a ballot for Trump in 2016. Last, even after adjusting for all these other characteristics, counties within the same state where a greater share of residents do not agree that global warming is happening are substantially less likely to change their behavior in response to Covid-19.
In fact, attitudes toward climate change are one of the strongest and most robust predictors of social distancing behavior. In the full model I find that an increase of 10 percentage points in the share of residents who do not agree that global warming is happening is associated with a 1 point drop in the county’s social distancing grade — which essentially means shifting from, say, a C to a B- in social distancing behavior.
The same results apply no matter how I run the analysis, and they apply to just about every question asked in the Climate Change in the American Mind survey. In the places where residents don’t think global warming is real, where they don’t believe humans are responsible, where they don’t think citizens have a responsibility to act, residents are also failing to change their behavior during the coronavirus crisis.
The problem of collective action in the United States
America’s spatial divisions are being exposed and amplified during this period of crisis. Because Covid-19 isn’t bound by the administrative boundaries that divide one county from another, efforts to mitigate the spread of the virus in any given county can be undermined by residents one county over who are ignoring guidelines for social distancing. Divergence in social distancing behavior represents perhaps the most serious risk to our national efforts to overcome this crisis.
But the problem isn’t limited to the coronavirus. When we do get past this crisis, we will face a set of new challenges, along with others that have been around for decades but are becoming more urgent. How does our economy recover from Covid-19? How do we deal with the long-term rise of economic inequality, and the persistence of racial inequality and injustice? What do we do about the opioid epidemic? And how do we respond to climate change?
All these challenges require a collective, unified solution, and difficult decisions to protect the entire society and future generations. Yet we are a nation that has become increasingly divided along spatial lines. For decades, Americans have been encouraged to respond to major challenges like urban decline, social unrest, and environmental degradation by isolating themselves in areas that are increasingly segregated by class and by politics.
Covid-19 is exposing the limits of that response, but it also raises a question that is crucial to answer if the United States is going to prosper in the coming decades: In a divided nation, how do we come together — figuratively, for the time being — to solve collective challenges?
Patrick Sharkey is professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Follow him on Twitter: @patrick_sharkey.
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