Predicting the issuance of COVID-19 stay-at-home orders in Africa: Using machine learning to develop insight for health policy research.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries have issued stay-at-home orders (SAHOs) to reduce viral transmission. Because of their social and economic consequences, SAHOs are a politically risky decision for governments. Researchers typically attribute public health policymaking to five theoretically significant factors: political, scientific, social, economic, and external. However, a narrow focus on extant theory runs the risk of biasing findings and missing novel insights. This research employs machine learning to shift the focus from theory to data to generate hypotheses and insights "born from the data" and unconstrained by current knowledge. Beneficially, this approach can also confirm the extant theory. We apply machine learning in the form of a random forest classifier to a novel and multiple-domain data set of 88 variables to identify the most significant predictors of the issuance of a COVID-19-related SAHO in African countries (n = 54). Our data set includes a wide range of variables from sources such as the World Health Organization that cover the five principal theoretical factors and previously ignored domains. Generated using 1000 simulations, our model identifies a combination of theoretically significant and novel variables as the most important to the issuance of a SAHO and has a predictive accuracy using 10 variables of 78%, which represents a 56% increase in accuracy compared to simply predicting the modal outcome.

Following the Science? Examining the Issuance of Stay-At-Home Orders Related to COVID-19 by U.S. Governors.

Informed by the public health policymaking literature, this study's objective is to identify scientific, political, social, economic, and external factors related to U.S. governors' decisions to issue stay-at-home orders (SAHOs) in response to the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Public health experts advocate for social distancing to slow the spread of infectious diseases, but government mandates to social distance can impose substantial social and economic costs. This study uses event history analysis to investigate the issuance of COVID-19-related gubernatorial SAHOs during a 41-day period in the 50 U.S. states. The findings indicate that scientific, political, and economic factors were associated with the issuance of SAHOs, but that external considerations played the largest role, particularly those related to the timing of other governors' decisions. This study offers evidence about how some U.S. political leaders balance public health concerns against other considerations and, more broadly, how state governments address crisis-level issues.

Identifying factors related to school closures due to COVID-19 in the Middle East and North Africa region.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had devastating effects on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, and MENA states have taken dramatic steps in response. This study focuses on school closures, an intervention that all MENA states adopted, some much earlier than others. It seeks to identify policy factors related to MENA governments' decisions to close schools during the first wave of the pandemic. Results suggest external issues regarding temporal and geographic diffusion played the largest role. They also indicate that factors related to disease risk, the economy, political institutions, and women's position in society mattered as well, all of which suggest the decisions were complex.

Prioritizing public health? Factors affecting the issuance of stay-at-home orders in response to COVID-19 in Africa.

COVID-19 has sickened and killed millions of people globally. Conventional non-pharmaceutical interventions, particularly stay-at-home orders (SAHOs), though effective for limiting the spread of disease have significantly disrupted social and economic systems. The effects also have been dramatic in Africa, where many states are already vulnerable due to their developmental status. This study is designed to test hypotheses derived from the public health policymaking literature regarding the roles played by medical and political factors as well as social, economic, and external factors in African countries' issuance of SAHOs in response to the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using event history analysis, this study analyzed these five common factors related to public health policy to determine their impact on African states' varying decisions regarding the issuance of SAHOs. The results of this analysis suggest that medical factors significantly influenced decisions as did factors external to the states, while the role of political factors was limited. Social and economic factors played no discernible role. Overall, this study suggests how African leaders prioritized competing factors in the early stages of a public health crisis.

Identifying factors associated with the issuance of coronavirus-related stay-at-home orders in the Middle East and North Africa Region.

The COVID-19 pandemic has not spared the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Region. MENA is one of the most politically, socially, and economically heterogeneous regions in the world, a characteristic reflected in its governments' responses to COVID-19. About two-thirds of these governments issued coronavirus-related stay-at-home orders (SAHOs), one of the most effective tools public health officials have for slowing the spread of infectious diseases. While SAHOs are very effective in terms of countering infectious diseases, they are extremely disruptive in nonhealth domains. The objective of this study is to identify reliable factors related to health care policy making that shaped the decisions of MENA governments to issue a SAHO or not in response to COVID-19. The results identify specific political, social, and medical factors that played important roles and provide a look at early government responses to a global health crisis in a heterogeneous region of the world.

An Experimental Examination of Demand-Side Preferences for Female and Male National Leaders.

Females constitute a far smaller proportion of political leaders than their proportion in the general population. Leading demand- and supply side explanations for this phenomenon account for some of the variance but leave a great deal unexplained. In an effort to account for additional variance, this research evaluates the issue informed by the biological theory of evolution by natural selection, a foundational explanation for the diversity and function of living organisms. It experimentally assesses how varying types of inter- and intragroup threat-a recurring ancestral problem-affect demand for female and male national leaders. This work analyzes data collected from individuals (N = 826) in the U.S. during the 2012 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. The results suggest the predominant preference for male over female leaders in some contexts may be the non-adaptive and non-functional but lingering outcome of an adaptive preference for physically formidable allies that was shaped by natural selection in ancestral environments.

Perceptions of political leaders.

Partisan identification is a fundamental force in individual and mass political behavior around the world. Informed by scholarship on human sociality, coalitional psychology, and group behavior, this research argues that partisan identification, like many other group-based behaviors, is influenced by forces of evolution. If correct, then party identifiers should exhibit adaptive behaviors when making group-related political decisions. The authors test this assertion with citizen assessments of the relative physical formidability of competing leaders, an important adaptive factor in leader evaluations. Using original and novel data collected during the contextually different 2008 and 2012 U.S. presidential elections, as well as two distinct measures obtained during both elections, this article presents evidence that partisans overestimate the physical stature of the presidential candidate of their own party compared with the stature of the candidate of the opposition party. These findings suggest that the power of party identification on political behavior may be attributable to the fact that modern political parties address problems similar to the problems groups faced in human ancestral times.

Evolutionary preferences for physical formidability in leaders.

This research uses evolutionary theory to evaluate followers' preferences for physically formidable leaders and to identify conditions that stimulate those preferences. It employs a population-based survey experiment (N ≥ 760), which offers the advantages to internal validity of experiments and external validity of a highly heterogeneous sample drawn from a nationally representative subject pool. The theoretical argument proffered here is followers tend to prefer leaders with greater physical formidability because of evolutionary adaptations derived from humans' violent ancestral environment. In this environment, individuals who allied with and ultimately followed physically powerful partners were more likely to acquire and retain important resources necessary for survival and reproduction because the presence of the physically powerful partner cued opponents to avoid a challenge for the resources or risk a costly confrontation. This argument suggests and the results indicate that threatening (war) and nonthreatening (peace, cooperation, and control) stimuli differentially motivate preferences for physically formidable leaders. In particular, the findings suggest threatening conditions lead to preferences for leaders with more powerful physical attributes, both anthropometric (i.e., weight, height, and body mass index) and perceptual (i.e., attributes of being "physically imposing or intimidating" and "physically strong"). Overall, this research offers a theoretical framework from which to understand this otherwise seemingly irrational phenomenon. Further, it advances the emerging but long-neglected investigation of biological effects on political behavior and has implications for a fundamental process in democratic society, leader selection.

Convenient yet not a convenience sample: Jury pools as experimental subject pools.

Scholars greatly benefit from access to convenient, inexpensive data sources. Many researchers rely on student subject pools, a practice that raises concern about the "college sophomore problem," or the possibility that findings from student subjects do not generalize beyond the campus. As an accessible, low cost, and heterogeneous data source, some researchers have used subjects recruited from jury pools, which are drawn from randomly-selected citizens required by law to appear for jury duty. In this paper, we discuss the strengths and weaknesses of this approach. First, we review pragmatic considerations involving access to jury pools, substantive content, the administration of survey-experiments, and the financial costs and benefits of this approach. Next, we present evidence regarding the quality of jury pool samples in terms of response rates, diversity, and representativeness. We conclude that jury pools, given proper attention to their limitations, offer an attractive addition to the viable sources of experimental data.