A Study On The Impact Of Political Polarization On COVID-19 Prevention And Control In The United States

Corona Virus Disease 2019(Covid-19)has taken the world by storm in 2020,and various countries around the world have been hit hard to varying degrees.The pandemic situation in the United States is particularly severe.As a superpower,the United States has advanced medical level,huge resources,powerful biomedical power and professional scientific knowledge,but it has become the country with the most severe epidemic in the world.What is hampering U.S.efforts to combat the pandemic? This paper argues that such consequences have a great relationship with the political polarization in the United States.On the issue of COVID-19 prevention and control,the two parties in the United States have been fighting constantly,and both have adopted positions and policies with their own party colors.Driven by partisan politics,citizens’ choice of whether to wear masks or not and whether to maintain social distance once became a political statement.The slow response of the government to COVID-19 prevention and control and the erosion of collective action capacity caused by political polarization have made it difficult for the whole country to mobilize the initiative of all parties and form joint efforts to effectively deal with the pandemic.Faced with the severe epidemic situation in the United States,it is of great significance to study the factors affecting the epidemic situation in the United States.Therefore,this paper focuses on the political polarization,and tries to explore the relationship between political polarization in the United States and COVID-19 prevention and control,as well as the influence of political polarization on COVID-19 prevention and control in the United States.This paper adopts the method of case comparison and analysis to divide three representative U.S.state units into two groups for comparison.First,Wisconsin and Arizona,both of which have poor pandemic prevention and control effects,were selected to explore the relationship between political polarization and COVID-19 prevention and control in these two states under the circumstance of differences in other factors through the " method of agreement".Secondly,Vermont,which has a relatively different pandemic prevention effect from Wisconsin,was selected to investigate the influence of political polarization on the COVID-19 prevention and control of the two states under the condition that other factors were similar.Through the comparison of the two groups of cases,it can be concluded that political polarization has profoundly affected the pandemic prevention and control in the United States.States with a low degree of political polarization had better prevention and control effects.States with a high degree of political polarization are less effective in preventing and controlling.Then,this paper continues to use the quantitative analysis method.Data characteristics of each variable were analyzed by descriptive statistics and regression model analysis was used to test the correlation between COVID-19 prevention and control in the United States and political polarization obtained in the above case study.The regression results showed that the degree of political polarization in the United States was significantly related to pandemic prevention and control,which proved the conclusion obtained in the small sample case study.It can be proved that as the pandemic gradually gets under control,the entire US society should try to put aside their differences,unite as one,and actively respond to COVID-19.