Replication Data for: Professional Partisans? Primary Care Physicians, State Governments, and COVID-19 Responsibility and Response

Emerging health crises, by their nature, challenge and overwhelm federal political systems (Greer et al., 2020). Within the context of COVID-19, states and governors were called on take charge in the absence of a coordinated federal response (Bowman McKenzie, 2020; Weissert, Uttermark, Mackie, Artiles,(Kettl, 2020) 2021). The result was uneven policy responses (e.g., economic lockdowns, masks mandates, and social distancing) and variance in health-related and economic outcomes across states (Warner Zhang, 2021; Zhang Warner, 2020). While existing research has explored public evaluations of state government policies aimed at minimizing the public health and economic consequences of the pandemic (Jacobs, 2021; Kettl, 2020), we explore how primary care physicians evaluated state government’s treatment responsibility for the pandemic, how much trust they placed in state government officials for handling the pandemic, and how they evaluated the effectiveness of their state’s response. Using an original survey of 625 primary care physicians, we find both that general preferences for the role that federal/state government ought to play in addressing the COVID-19 pandemic are shaped by individual-level physician partisanship, and that specific evaluations of policy responsiveness in one’s home state are influenced by whether or not physicians’ partisan preferences matched those of their governor. We also find, however, that Republican physicians were critical of Republican governors and that physicians were less partisan than the general public. At least within public health, there are limits to the influence of partisan identity on medical expert (physician) state political evaluations.