Congressional Communication in a Pandemic: “Follow the Leader” Politics and Responsive Representation

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic touched every part of the United States. Government officials were tasked with communicating information to the public about a quickly changing crisis. This article aims to ask and answer important questions surrounding how differently situated legislators discussed the outbreak of the novel coronavirus of 2019 and resultant pandemic of COVID-19 with their constituents in official communications. We assess a theory of responsive representation as well as a theory positing that co-partisan legislators took their cues from the president, which we call follow the leader politics. To facilitate this study, we have created a new dataset of COVID-19 deaths by congressional district. We find that legislators who saw more in-district fatalities in the earlier parts of the pandemic sent more COVID-19 communications than others. We also find that co-partisans were more likely to use derogatory terminology to refer to COVID-19 in official communications and were more likely to tout hydroxychloroquine. There are limits to follow the leader politics, however: when it came to mask use, both Democrats and Republicans in Congress encouraged constituents to do so as soon as the CDC and Surgeon General guidelines indicated.