Political polarization dynamic during the covid-19 in developed countries

Abstract

This paper studies how the government-opposition political polarization changed after nine developed countries decided to implement lockdowns during the onset of the covid-19 pandemic. Using Twitter data from party, party political leaders, and government official accounts, we estimate the political polarization evolution during 2020 and provide validation evidence by observing recent presidential elections in the US and Poland and studying the effect of the protests after George Floyd's murder. We also show that the high level of political polarization is not driven by different communication styles between government officials and party political leaders. Implementing a stacked event study, we show that politicians' tweet is 2.5 percentage points less likely to identify group belonging two weeks after a lockdown is implemented. This result vanishes four weeks after the lockdown. Importantly, results are similar when focusing on Covid-19-related tweets.