Replication Data for: Polarized Politics: Protest Against Covid-19 Containment Policies in the USA

Protest against containment policies in US states is fueled by two drivers: the stringency of containment policies and the partisan control over the governorship and legislatures in each state. In our analysis over the period from March 2020 to March 2022, we find more protest events in states fully controlled by Democrats than in Republican controlled states both in a sample consisting of all states and a balanced sample in which we constrain observations to those red and blue states with on average similarly stringent containment policies. Protest was therefore politicized and we find that partisanship exerts a roughly equal substantive effect on the number of protest events as the stringency of containment policies. If we assume no direct effect of partisanship on protest but allow for causal heterogeneity along partisan lines in the effect of containment policies, we find that the same increase in the stringency of policies evokes a stronger protest response in blue states than in red states.美国各州针对防疫管控政策的抗议活动，由两大核心驱动因素推动：其一为管控政策的严格程度，其二为各州州长与州议会的党派掌控格局。在2020年3月至2022年3月的分析周期内，我们发现，无论是纳入全部州的全样本，还是将观测样本限定为管控政策严格程度均值相近的红蓝州所构建的平衡样本中，由民主党完全掌控的州的抗议事件数量均多于共和党掌控的州。由此可见，抗议活动已被政治化；且我们发现，党派因素对抗议事件数量的实质影响与管控政策严格程度的影响大致相当。若假设党派因素对抗议活动无直接影响，但允许管控政策的效应沿党派维度存在因果异质性，则我们发现，政策严格程度的同等提升，在蓝州引发的抗议响应强度显著高于红州。