PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Emily Pears
AU  - Emily Sydnor
TI  - COVID-19 and the Culture of American Federalism
AID  - 10.7758/RSF.2022.8.8.09
DP  - 2022 Dec 01
TA  - RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences
PG  - 181--220
VI  - 8
IP  - 8
4099  - http://www.rsfjournal.org/content/8/8/181.short
4100  - http://www.rsfjournal.org/content/8/8/181.full
AB  - COVID-19 highlighted America’s federalist structure as the dissemination of pandemic information was frequently left to states and localities. For some citizens, this was a welcome relief from national-level policymaking and political narratives, though others argued that the federal government was failing to live up to its obligations. We identify three reasons for variation in Americans’ trust in information from different levels of government: partisanship, ideology, and state identity. Using data from a representative online survey of more than one thousand people, we demonstrate that each individual characteristic shaped respondents’ trust in leaders to provide pandemic information. Partisanship and ideology played major roles in information trust at both the national and state level, but individuals’ psychological attachment to their state and to the nation also shaped their trust in the federated information environment.