Trends in the Political Polarization of Civil Liberties in the U.S. vs. Europe

The COVID-19 pandemic was an unprecedented "stress test" for liberal democracies, prompting restrictions on civil liberties as part of the public health response. To what extent did the citizens of Western Democracies agree on these restrictions and how did these views change over time across countries and individuals? We examine these questions using nationally representative surveys fielded at the initial (March-April 2020) and later (March-May 2022) phases of the COVID-19 pandemic in France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Our analysis, based on random forest prediction and OLS regression models, reveals that during the initial phase of the pandemic, objective COVID-19 prevalence was the most important factor in explaining views on sacrificing civil liberties across all countries with broad agreement across citizens within countries. However, by the later phase in 2022, political affiliation became the most significant predictor of willingness to sacrifice civil liberties and a large partisan gap emerged in the U.S., while in Europe, disease burden remained the most important predictive factor. We further demonstrate that the U.S. partisan gap is narrowed after conditioning on subjective beliefs of COVID-19 prevalence, providing evidence that different interpretation of the same facts about the disease contributed to the divide. These differing interpretations of similar facts could be influenced by the media, which we document increasingly provided polarized views on the pandemic in the U.S.