Replication Data for: "Body Politic: Disgust, Partisanship, and Public Opinion on Viral Outbreaks"

How does the public form opinions about viral outbreaks, including the steps they are personally willing to take and the policies governments should enact to mitigate the risk of infection and death? Drawing on surveys from 2016, 2020, and 2022, we compare attitudes toward three distinct outbreaks: the Ebola virus, the Zika virus, and the novel coronavirus that produced the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the differences across these outbreaks, we find that people’s level of disgust sensitivity underpins attitudes in all three cases. In contrast, party identification has a varying association with attitudes both across these outbreaks and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Disgust sensitivity also mitigates the effect of party identification on COVID-19 attitudes, generating a degree of consensus at higher levels of disgust sensitivity even amid substantial partisan polarization.