830
Views
3
CrossRef citations to date
0
Altmetric
Research Article

Politicization of Science in COVID-19 Vaccine Communication: Comparing US Politicians, Medical Experts, and Government Agencies

ORCID Icon, ORCID Icon &

References

  • Arendt, F., Forrai, M., & Mestas, M. (2022). News framing and preference-based reinforcement: Evidence from a real framing environment during the COVID-19 pandemic. Communication Research, 50(2), 009365022211021. https://doi.org/10.1177/00936502221102104
  • Bailard, C. S. (2022). Do local newspapers mitigate the effects of the polarized national rhetoric on COVID-19? The International Journal of Press/politics, 194016122110727. https://doi.org/10.1177/19401612211072774
  • Benoit, K., Watanabe, K., Wang, H., Nulty, P., Obeng, A., Müller, S., & Matsuo, A. (2018). Quanteda: An R package for the quantitative analysis of textual data. Journal of Open Source Software, 3(30), 774. https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.00774
  • Bolsen, T., & Druckman, J. N. (2015). Counteracting the politicization of science. Journal of Communication, 65(5), 745–769. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12171
  • Bolsen, T., & Druckman, J. N. (2018). Do partisanship and politicization undermine the impact of a scientific consensus message about climate change? Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 21(3), 389–402. https://doi.org/10.1177/1368430217737855
  • Börzel, T. A., & Risse, T. (2021). Effective governance under anarchy: Institutions, legitimacy, and social trust in areas of limited statehood. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316872079
  • Canel, M. J., & Sanders, K. (2012). Government communication: An emerging field in political communication research. In H. A. Semetko & M. Scammell (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of political communication (pp. 85–96). SAGE Publications.
  • Canel, M. J., & Sanders, K. (2014). Is it enough to be strategic? Comparing and defining professional government communication across disciplinary fields and between countries. In M. J. Canel & K. Voltmer (Eds.), Comparing political communication across time and space (pp. 98–116). Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137366474_7
  • Chen, K., Molder, A. L., Duan, Z., Boulianne, S., Eckart, C., Mallari, P., & Yang, D. (2022). How climate movement actors and news media frame climate change and strike: Evidence from analyzing Twitter and news media discourse from 2018 to 2021. The International Journal of Press/politics, 194016122211064(2), 384–413. https://doi.org/10.1177/19401612221106405
  • Chinn, S., Hart, P. S., & Soroka, S. (2020). Politicization and polarization in climate change news content, 1985-2017. Science Communication, 42(1), 112–129. https://doi.org/10.1177/1075547019900290
  • Collins, K. (2020). Fauci says he was taken out of context in new Trump campaign ad touting coronavirus response. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/11/politics/fauci-trump-campaign-ad-out-of-context/index.html
  • Crozier, M. (2007). Recursive governance: Contemporary political communication and public policy. Political Communication, 24(1), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584600601128382
  • de León, E., Makhortykh, M., Gil-Lopez, T., Urman, A., & Adam, S. (2022). News, threats, and trust: How COVID-19 news shaped political trust, and how threat perceptions conditioned this relationship. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 194016122210871. https://doi.org/10.1177/19401612221087179
  • DiMaggio, P. J., & Powell, W. W. (1983). The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields. American Sociological Review, 48(2), 147. https://doi.org/10.2307/2095101
  • Doh, J. P., & Guay, T. R. (2006). Corporate social responsibility, public policy, and NGO activism in Europe and the United States: An institutional-stakeholder perspective. Journal of Management Studies, 43(1), 47–73. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6486.2006.00582.x
  • Druckman, J. N. (2017). The crisis of politicization within and beyond science. Nature Human Behaviour, 1(9), 615–617. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-017-0183-5
  • Druckman, J. N. (2022). Threats to science: Politicization, misinformation, and inequalities. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 700(1), 8–24. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027162221095431
  • Feldman, D. L. (2015). The legitimacy of U.S. government agency power. Public Administration Review, 75(1), 75–84. https://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12279
  • Fiorina, M. P., & Abrams, S. J. (2008). Political polarization in the American public. Annual Review of Political Science, 11(1), 563–588. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.polisci.11.053106.153836
  • Flores, A., Cole, J. C., Dickert, S., Eom, K., Jiga-Boy, G. M., Kogut, T., Loria, R., Mayorga, M., Pedersen, E. J., Pereira, B., Rubaltelli, E., Sherman, D. K., Slovic, P., Västfjäll, D., & Van Boven, L. (2022). Politicians polarize and experts depolarize public support for COVID-19 management policies across countries. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(3), e2117543119. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2117543119
  • Fowler, E. F., & Gollust, S. E. (2015). The content and effect of politicized health controversies. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 658(1), 155–171. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716214555505
  • Freeman, R. E. (1994). The politics of stakeholder theory: Some future directions. Business Ethics Quarterly, 4(4), 409–421. https://doi.org/10.2307/3857340
  • Freeman, R. E., & Dmytriyev, S. (2017). Corporate social responsibility and stakeholder theory: Learning from each other. Emerging Issues in Management, 1(1), 7–15. https://doi.org/10.4468/2017.1.02freeman.dmytriyev
  • Gauchat, G. (2012). Politicization of science in the public sphere: A study of public trust in the United States, 1974 to 2010. American Sociological Review, 77(2), 167–187. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122412438225
  • Giuntella, O., Hyde, K., Saccardo, S., & Sadoff, S. (2021). Lifestyle and mental health disruptions during COVID-19. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(9), e2016632118. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2016632118
  • Goldberg, D. S. (2012). Against the very idea of the politicization of public health policy. American Journal of Public Health, 102(1), 44–49. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2011.300325
  • Gollust, S. E., Nagler, R. H., & Fowler, E. F. (2020). The emergence of COVID-19 in the US: A public health and political communication crisis. Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, 45(6), 967–981. https://doi.org/10.1215/03616878-8641506
  • González-Bailón, S. (2017). Decoding the social world: Data science and the unintended consequences of communication. MIT Press.
  • Gostin, L. O. (2018). Language, science, and politics: The politicization of public health. JAMA, 319(6), 541. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2017.21763
  • Grimmer, J., Roberts, M. E., & Stewart, B. M. (2022). Text as data: A new framework for machine learning and the social sciences. Princeton University Press.
  • Grossman, G., Kim, S., Rexer, J. M., & Thirumurthy, H. (2020). Political partisanship influences behavioral responses to governors’ recommendations for COVID-19 prevention in the United States. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(39), 24144–24153. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2007835117
  • Halpern, L. W. (2020). The politicization of COVID-19. The American Journal of Nursing, 120(11), 19–20. https://doi.org/10.1097/01.NAJ.0000721912.74581.d7
  • Hart, P. S., Chinn, S., & Soroka, S. (2020). Politicization and polarization in COVID-19 news coverage. Science Communication, 42(5), 679–697. https://doi.org/10.1177/1075547020950735
  • Horsley, J. S., Liu, B. F., & Levenshus, A. B. (2010). Comparisons of U.S. government communication practices: Expanding the government communication decision wheel. Communication Theory, 20(3), 269–295. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2010.01363.x
  • Kerwin, C. M., & Furlong, S. R. (2019). Rulemaking: How government agencies write law and make policy. SAGE Publications.
  • Lee, N. M., & VanDyke, M. S. (2015). Set it and forget it: The one-way use of social media by government agencies communicating science. Science Communication, 37(4), 533–541. https://doi.org/10.1177/1075547015588600
  • Liu, W., & Xu, W. (2019). Tweeting to (selectively) engage: How government agencies target stakeholders on Twitter during Hurricane Harvey. International Journal of Communication, 13, 4917–4939.
  • Lupia, A. (2013). Communicating science in politicized environments. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(supplement_3), 14048–14054. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1212726110
  • Maibach, E. W., & van der Linden, S. L. (2016). The importance of assessing and communicating scientific consensus. Environmental Research Letters, 11(9), 091003. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/11/9/091003
  • Molnar, C. (2019). Interpretable machine learning: A guide for making black box models explainable (2nd ed.). https://christophm.github.io/interpretable-ml-book/
  • Monroe, B. L., Colaresi, M. P., & Quinn, K. M. (2008). Fightin’ words: Lexical feature selection and evaluation for identifying the content of political conflict. Political Analysis, 16(4), 372–403. https://doi.org/10.1093/pan/mpn018
  • Mosleh, M., & Rand, D. G. (2021). Falsehood in, falsehood out: Measuring exposure to elite misinformation on Twitter (Preprint). PsyArxiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/ye3pf
  • Nisbet, M. C. (2009). Communicating climate change: Why frames matter for public engagement. Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development, 51(2), 12–23. https://doi.org/10.3200/ENVT.51.2.12-23
  • Oreskes, N., & Conway, E. M. (2011). Merchants of doubt: How a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming. Bloomsbury Press.
  • Park, H., & Lee, T. (2018). Adoption of e-government applications for public health risk communication: Government trust and social media competence as primary drivers. Journal of Health Communication, 23(8), 712–723. https://doi.org/10.1080/10810730.2018.1511013
  • Pedregosa, F., Varoquaux, G., Gramfort, A., Michel, V., Thirion, B., Grisel, O., Blondel, M., Prettenhofer, P., Weiss, R., Dubourg, V., Vanderplas, J., Passos, A., Cournapeau, D., Brucher, M., Perrot, M., & Duchesnay, É. (2011). Scikit-learn: Machine learning in python. Journal of Machine Learning Research, 12(85), 2825–2830. http://jmlr.org/papers/v12/pedregosa11a.html
  • Pink, S. L., Chu, J., Druckman, J. N., Rand, D. G., & Willer, R. (2021). Elite party cues increase vaccination intentions among Republicans. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(32), e2106559118. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2106559118
  • Rothstein, B. (2009). Creating political legitimacy: Electoral democracy versus quality of government. The American Behavioral Scientist, 53(3), 311–330. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764209338795
  • Sanders, K., Crespo, M. J. C., & Holtz-Bacha, C. (2011). Communicating governments: A three-country comparison of how governments communicate with citizens. The International Journal of Press/politics, 16(4), 523–547. https://doi.org/10.1177/1940161211418225
  • Sanger, M. B. (2008). From measurement to management: Breaking through the barriers to state and local performance. Public Administration Review, 68, S70–85. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6210.2008.00980.x
  • Santhanam, L. (2020). Track the spread of novel coronavirus with this map. PBS. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/track-the-spread-of-novel-coronavirus-with-this-map
  • Saulsberry, L., Fowler, E. F., Nagler, R. H., & Gollust, S. E. (2019). Perceptions of politicization and HPV vaccine policy support. Vaccine, 37(35), 5121–5128. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.vaccine.2019.05.062
  • Schlesinger, M. (2002). A loss of faith: The sources of reduced political legitimacy for the American medical profession. The Milbank Quarterly, 80(2), 185–235. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0009.t01-1-00010
  • Schmid-Petri, H. (2017). Politicization of science: How climate change skeptics use experts and scientific evidence in their online communication. Climatic Change, 145(3–4), 523–537. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-017-2112-z
  • Scott, W. R. (1994). Conceptualizing organizational fields: Linking organizations and societal systems. In M.-H.-U. Derlien, M. U. Gerhadt, & F. W. Scharpf (Eds.), Systems rationality and partial interests (pp. 203–221). Nomos Verglagsgesellschaft.
  • Shin, J., Yang, A., Liu, W., Min Kim, H., Zhou, A., & Sun, J. (2022). Mask-wearing as a partisan issue: Social identity and communication of party norms on social media among political elites. Social Media + Society, 8(1), 205630512210862. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221086233
  • Theocharis, Y., & Jungherr, A. (2021). Computational social science and the study of political communication. Political Communication, 38(1–2), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2020.1833121
  • Van Atteveldt, W. (2008). Semantic network analysis: Techniques for extracting, representing and querying media content. BookSurge Publ.
  • van der Linden, S., Leiserowitz, A., & Maibach, E. (2018). Scientific agreement can neutralize politicization of facts. Nature Human Behaviour, 2(1), 2–3. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-017-0259-2
  • Windsor, L. C. (2021). Advancing interdisciplinary work in computational communication science. Political Communication, 38(1–2), 182–191. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2020.1765915
  • Yang, S. -U. (2018). Effects of government dialogic competency: The MERS outbreak and implications for public health crises and political legitimacy. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 95(4), 1011–1032. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077699017750360
  • Yang, A., Shin, J., Zhou, A., Huang-Isherwood, K. M., Lee, E., Dong, C., Kim, H. M., Zhang, Y., Sun, J., Li, Y., Nan, Y., Zhen, L., & Liu, W. (2021). The battleground of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation on Facebook: Fact checkers vs. misinformation spreaders. Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review. https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-78
  • Zhou, A., Liu, W., Kim, H. M., Lee, E., Shin, J., Zhang, Y., Huang-Isherwood, K. M., Dong, C., & Yang, A. (2022). Moral foundations, ideological divide, and public engagement with U.S. government agencies’ COVID-19 vaccine communication on social media. Mass Communication and Society, 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/15205436.2022.2151919

Reprints and Corporate Permissions

Please note: Selecting permissions does not provide access to the full text of the article, please see our help page How do I view content?

To request a reprint or corporate permissions for this article, please click on the relevant link below:

Academic Permissions

Please note: Selecting permissions does not provide access to the full text of the article, please see our help page How do I view content?

Obtain permissions instantly via Rightslink by clicking on the button below:

If you are unable to obtain permissions via Rightslink, please complete and submit this Permissions form. For more information, please visit our Permissions help page.