The Politicization of COVID-19 and Anti-Asian Racism in the United States: An Experimental Approach

The deadly outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has accompanied a worldwide surge in anti-Asian hate crimes and racial violence. In this paper, I experimentally assess the downstream effects of the health crisis on the racial attitudes of the American public. Survey respondents were randomly assigned to different messages about COVID-19 and its association with China and answered a battery of racial attitude questions, including a new measure of anti-Asian racial resentment. Across all outcome measures, I find null effects for both treatment messages, which suggests that racialized views toward Asians may be stable individual-level dispositions that have shaped American responses to the pandemic. Findings from this study have important implications for research on the far-reaching societal and political consequences of the pandemic in the United States and beyond.