10/25/2024 | News release | Distributed by Public on 10/25/2024 05:11
News coverage of the 2024 election season has often centered on how partisan division has affected our politics. But a new analysis shows that political polarization also poses significant health risks-by obstructing the implementation of legislation and policies aimed at keeping Americans healthy, by discouraging individual action to address health needs, such as getting a flu shot, and by boosting the spread of misinformation that can reduce trust in health professionals.
"Compared to other high-income countries, the United States has a disadvantage when it comes to the health of its citizens," says Jay Van Bavel, a professor in New York University's Department of Psychology and an author of the analysis, which appears in the journal Nature Medicine. "America's growing political polarization is only exacerbating this shortcoming."
But despite the challenges of political polarization, the analysis, which considered more than 100 experimental papers and reviews, pointed to potential ways to both minimize its impact on Americans' health and promote health-care practices.
"Division is a major problem and the one real solution is trust. Public health agencies need to work with trusted voices and leaders, being proactive at sharing information, engaging questions, and not writing off concerns as irrelevant," says Kai Ruggeri, a professor at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and one of the paper's authors. "In a time when some people look less to doctors and more to prominent figures for information on decisions related to our health, the best steps involve engaging directly with those voices."
The analysis, which also included Eric Knowles, a professor in NYU's Department of Psychology, and Shana Kushner Gadarian, a professor in Syracuse University's Department of Political Science, considered Americans' views of the opposite party over four decades, health-related behaviors during the coronavirus pandemic, and comparative data from other countries.
Over the past four decades, the paper's authors note, partisan animosity has steadily increased in the US. By 2020, Americans were much more likely to say they "hate" the opposite party than they were to say they "love" their own party; by contrast, from 1980 through 2008, Americans were more likely to say they loved their own party than they were to say they hated the opposite party-though "party love" relative to "opposite party hate" has drawn closer virtually every year since 1980, becoming approximately even in 2012 and with "hate" surpassing "love" beginning in 2016.
Partisan animosity in the United States has steadily increased from 1980 to 2020. The estimates on the y axis reflect the strength of in-party love minus out-party hate. Adapted with permission from Science magazine: Finkel et al., "Political sectarianism in America," Science, October 30, 2020.
In their analysis and review of previous studies, the paper's authors also examined a range of health-care related studies, which showed the following:
The authors write that "although polarization is a risk factor for disease and mortality in a public health crisis, this outcome is not inevitable." They point to a study comparing the US and Canada that suggests policy and leadership decisions can mitigate the potential harm from polarization. Although both nations were politically polarized at the onset of the pandemic, research found that political leaders in Canada took a different approach to those in the United States and also experienced a significantly lower level of illness and mortality.
This and other studies point to specific approaches public officials and health-care professionals can take, which the Nature Medicine authors outline:
"Polarization is not only an American concern, but one that is increasing in many countries," says Syracuse's Gadarian. "This means we should be investing more in understanding and diminishing its impact on public health by encouraging collaborations between medical professionals and social scientists."