"The virus has become an indicator of tribal identity," social psychologist Jonathan Haidt recently warned in the pages of the
New York Times
.
He was referring to American society, where it has been observed in many studies how compliance with the restrictions to stop contagions is closely linked to the vote of citizens: partisanship influences behavior more than the severity of infections in the environment.
A new study now brings this tribal reality closer to the European context and, for the first time, shows a direct correlation between deaths from covid and political tension in 153 regions of 19 European nations.
“Increased social and political polarization may have ended up costing lives during the first wave of COVID-19 in Europe,” this work concludes.
“We found that higher levels of polarization predict significantly higher [excess] deaths.
For example, the difference in the excess of deaths between two regions, one without polarization of the masses (2.7%) and another with maximum levels (14.4%), is more than five times greater ”, indicates this study, in the process of being published in a scientific journal.
“We wanted to test that possibility that has been talked about so much and we observed that there is a fairly clear association, correlations that go along that line.
There are clear indicators that it seriously harms performance, ”says Víctor Lapuente, from the University of Gothenburg, who signed this paper with his colleague Nicholas Charron and Andrés Rodríguez-Pose, from the London School of Economics.
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In other words, the damage caused by the pandemic increased in those European regions where there was more division between those who support their rulers and those who reject them.
Because, as this study shows, the greatest differences in excess mortality from covid do not occur between countries, but between territories within the countries themselves.
The authors propose three mechanisms that would explain this phenomenon.
First, it is more difficult for governments to build a political consensus on the measures;
second, the demands of pressure groups (eg businessmen) are given priority over public health;
and third, because with polarization, policies become more populist and less based on expert judgment.
“Underlying is the fear of the reaction of the media, that the opposition will take on them.
Under these conditions, the best decisions cannot be made, because the context grips the rulers ”, comments Lapuente, professor at ESADE.
Leaders are paralyzed by the fear of overshooting or falling short, when in the face of the pandemic, speed and consistency is essential.
“Be quick, without regrets.
If you need to be right before you move, you will never win ”, warned on March 13, 2020 Michael Ryan, director of Health Emergencies of the WHO.
"Spain is a particularly serious case," says Lapuente, "where the debate has been very dichotomous and the communication strategy dominates politics."
In an editorial, the medical journal
The Lancet Public Health
claimed that "political polarization and decentralized governance in Spain could also have hampered the speed and efficiency of the public health response."
“Underlying is the fear of the reaction of the media, that the opposition will take on them.
Under these conditions, the best decisions cannot be made, because the context grips the rulers "
Víctor Lapuente, University of Gothenburg
During the management of the pandemic, in some countries sanitary measures have been politicized to the extreme that in principle have nothing ideological.
Donald Trump's attitude towards masks determined their use in the United States, as well as in social distancing, which was higher among Democratic voters in the United States and lower among Bolsonaro supporters in Brazil.
A study published in
Nature Human Behavior
detects "a strong association between the levels of partisan animosity of citizens and their attitudes about the pandemic, as well as the actions they take in response to it."
Another in
Science Advances
is more blunt: "Our results point to an unequivocal conclusion: partisanship is a much more important determinant of an individual's response to the pandemic than the impact of COVID-19 on that individual's community."
Joaquín Navajas, neuropsychologist at CONICET, has just carried out a study analyzing the polarization in the citizen response in four countries with very interesting pandemic trajectories to compare: Argentina, Uruguay, the United States and Brazil.
First they asked people about the number of deaths that would be in their country and there were no surprises: the more support for the Government, the fewer deaths were expected.
"What surprised us a lot is that there was absolutely no relationship between the prognosis of the number of deaths that occurred and their degree of agreement with the public policies designed to combat covid," says Navajas, director of the Neuroscience Laboratory of the Torcuato University Say Tella.
Apparently irrational, in Argentina and Uruguay opposition supporters predicted more deaths, but showed less support for restrictions imposed by their leaders to prevent them.
“What matters is partisan tribalism.
The uncertainty due to the lack of information causes us to look for solutions in the leadership ”
Joaquín Navajas, CONICET
In this work, they also observed that ideology is not decisive, since there were no differences between Argentina and Uruguay, whose governments have different political signs: government supporters had the same opinion in both countries, as well as those of the opposition, but in a country governs the left and in another the right.
"What matters is partisan tribalism," Navajas argues.
And he adds: “The uncertainty due to the lack of information causes us to look for solutions in the leadership.
It is not strange that these tribalisms have been accentuated, for thousands of years it has worked for us to take refuge in our tribe to survive ”.
“In circumstances of high misinformation and lack of information, people look at the examples.
We can only be rational if our leaders are rational ”, explained recently the political scientist Sara Wallace Goodman, from the University of California.
He has published a study that concludes that "Americans interpret the pandemic in a fundamentally partisan way, and that the objective conditions of the pandemic play at best a minor role in shaping the preferences of the masses."
Leaders and false dilemmas
"In short crises it does not occur because everyone follows the leader and it is considered treason", explains Eloísa del Pino, researcher of public policies at the CSIC, "but when they lengthen and the potential for blaming increases, these phenomena do occur" .
"And when health measures are politicized, they lose efficiency," sums up Del Pino, who has studied the management of residences during the pandemic.
With each factor at stake, a false dilemma arises from the political and media elites that causes tension among citizens, who feel driven to choose with identity closure on scientific matters that they do not know.
A few months ago a study was published that explained how political support suddenly polarized issues that until then were not, and could generate even greater animosity: “The positive effect generated between the party's supporters and its leader is offset by the increase of the rejection of the detractors ”.
At this time, the greatest support for the covid vaccine in Spain is among the voters of the governing parties, while the greatest suspicion is among Vox voters.
"That also shows that it is more difficult to change human behavior than to get the vaccine in less than a year"
Arantxa Elizondo, University of the Basque Country
"This work [by Lapuente] shows that the outcome of the pandemic also has a lot to do with the behavior of institutions and political representatives," says Arantxa Elizondo, a professor at the University of the Basque Country.
As he explains, there are two issues that are constantly hampering the answer: the fear of the economic downturn "and the search for electoral profitability on the collective welfare.
"And that is not just a lack of humanity, it is a huge error," denounces Elizondo, president of the Spanish Association of Political Sciences and Administration.
"If this is so, polarization has cost lives, it is serious that many people who have died would have been saved with another attitude."
"That also shows that it is more difficult to change human behavior than to get the vaccine in less than a year," Elizondo summarizes.
As the pandemic unfolded, it was discovered that older people and people with previous pathologies were at greater risk.
Later, those with fewer resources and with worse living conditions were added.
Now, if the conclusions of these studies are confirmed, we can add another risk factor: living in a polarized country.
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