COVID-19 Pandemic and Nationalism

Early studies show that the COVID-19 pandemic causes the rally-around-the-flag effect and increases the level of nationalism among the voters after the outbreak. However, how long does this boost last? Voters may cognitively withdraw their identification to the beloved country if the pandemic is rampant in where they live as well as when the government fails to address it thouroughly. We conducted a pre-registered MTurk experiment (n=606) on April 20, 2020, in the U.S.– three months after the first confirmed case and weeks after the large-scale lockdown. Results show that U.S. subjects who were primed of the COVID-19 in the U.S. significantly decreased their level of nationalism, especially among Democrats. In contrast, the priming of “COVID-19 in the world” has no effect. The negative impact of COVID-19 on nationalism could be explained by enough time as people could observe and evaluate the government’s performance after the outbreak through the partisan lens.