A partisan pandemic: reviewing the findings in over 600 studies across 44 countries

This article explores the relationship between individuals’ political orientation and their health-related behaviours during the COVID-19 crisis. We review the literature to assess whether and how partisanship and political ideology were linked to individuals’ pandemic responses across countries. More specifically, we analyse over 600 journal articles that meet our selection criteria to extract information about the direction and nature of partisan pandemic behaviours. Our analysis yields three main findings: (1) individuals with right-leaning ideologies tend to report less COVID-19 protective behaviours; (2) this negative association is slightly more pronounced for vaccination behaviours than other non-pharmaceutical interventions; and (3) factors underpinning this relationship include scepticism towards science, beliefs in conspiracy theories, trust in institutions, as well as media and political cues. We conclude by outlining a future research agenda that calls for more attention to how different dimensions of political identity contribute to health behaviours, to the relative contributions of demand- and supply-side factors, and to comparative analyses of the scope conditions under which partisan health behaviours occur.