Partisanship, Policy, and Americans' Evaluations of State-Level COVID-19 Policies Prior to the 2020 Election.

The COVID-19 pandemic was a key policy issue during the 2020 election in the United States. As such, it is important to analyze how voters evaluated government responses to the pandemic. To this end, in this article, we examine factors that influenced Americans' evaluations of state-level COVID-19 policy responses. We find that during the pandemic onset period, Americans typically rated their state governments' responses more favorably if their governor was a co-partisan. In contrast, during the re-opening period, we find that Democrats relied on both partisanship and policy to evaluate their state-level responses, while Republicans continued to rely solely on partisanship. We contend that given the complex policy environment surrounding COVID-19, Americans may have not been fully aware of the policies their state governments adopted, so they relied on partisan cues to help them evaluate their state-level policy responses. But by the re-opening period, Americans likely had enough time to better understand state-level policy responses; this allowed Democrats to also evaluate their state-level responses based on policy. These findings shed light on how Americans evaluated COVID-19 responses just prior to the 2020 election.

A dataset on human perception of and response to wildfire smoke.

Wildfire smoke presents a growing threat in the Western U.S.; and human health, transportation, and economic systems in growing western communities suffer due to increasingly severe and widespread fires. While modelling wildfire activity and associated wildfire smoke distributions have substantially improved, understanding how people perceive and respond to emerging smoke hazards has received little attention. Understanding and incorporating human perceptions of threats from wildfire smoke is critical, as decision-makers need such information to mitigate smoke-related hazards. We surveyed 614 randomly selected people (in-person) across the Boise Metropolitan Area in Idaho and 1,623 Boise State University affiliates (online), collecting information about their level of outside activity during smoke event(s), knowledge about the source of air quality information and effective messaging preference, perception of wildfire smoke as a hazard, and smoke-related health experiences. This relatively large dataset provides a novel perspective of people's perception of smoke hazards, and provides crucial policy-relevant information to decision-makers. Dataset is available to the public and can be used to address a wide range of research questions.