CovOps
 Location : Ether-Sphere
Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator
Humor : Über Serious
 |  Subject: For what it's worth: How Proximity Makes Progressives  Sat Mar 26, 2022 10:35 pm | |
| Two years of a coronavirus pandemic and the extraordinary responses to it by all kinds of institutions and jurisdictions have generated masses of data that will be pored over for years to come. These data will have important things to tell researchers in a wide range of disciplines – from sociology, through behavioral psychology and political science to epidemiology and immunology.
Various governments all around the world strongly advised immunization and instituted policies to facilitate it. In the USA, for example, federal, state, county and municipal governments all passed measures to coerce citizens and companies to follow that advice.
Since detailed records of vaccination rates have been maintained, we now have a rather unusual dataset concerning not merely people’s stated opinions about a government policy or issue – but a revealed preference to follow, or refuse to follow, the strongest possible government advice.
Obviously, there are many reasons why someone might choose to get or not to get immunized against Covid with one of the recently and quickly developed products for the purpose, and so there are many variables with which rates of immunization might correlate.
No one has been surprised by the fact that Democratic-leaning areas have tended to respond to the pandemic with more restrictions while Republican-leaning areas have tended to resist doing so (in some cases even banning some of the restrictions imposed on citizens elsewhere).
Stricter lockdowns, mask mandates, and enforced “social” (read physical) distancing might be expected to make people feel safer and therefore less demanding of immunization. In fact, of course, immunization rates have tended to be higher in places with greater legal restrictions.
In such places, social and cultural pressures that are largely stimulated by government-promulgated information favor both the legal curtailments of basic rights (free movement, association, privacy etc.) and immunization. Many individuals have justified their support for both the legal restrictions (acts of public policy) and immunization (an act of private choice) as being necessitated by a moral responsibility toward other members of their communities.
Trust in government and its ability to solve problems has always tended to be higher in more urban areas. Government solutions tend to constrain individual action, and this too tends to be tolerated more in more populated areas. Across cultures and times, areas of higher population density have been associated with more politically and culturally progressive attitudes, manifested in a greater willingness to trust governmental power and to follow its lead.
Data on immunization are consistent with this general correlation.
For example, in the United States, according to Census and CDC data, the adult immunization rate in statistical metropolitan areas stands at 65.4% while that in non-metropolitan areas (of lower population density), is significantly lower at 57.4%.
A crude bivariate analysis of immunization rate vs. population density by state yields a striking correlation with an R2 of 0.24.
.https://brownstone.org/articles/how-proximity-makes-progressives/
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