Research shows Democrats trust doctors more than Republicans

A new study from the University of Oregon believes Democrats trust individual doctors and are more likely to follow doctor advice than Republicans.

Neil Oblian, a political scientist at UO and 2024 fellow Andrew Carnegie, co-authored the paper with independent researcher Thomas Bradley Kent. He recently appeared in the British Journal of Politics.

The findings affect personal and public health, as well as American medical practices.

Various studies have shown that patients who trust their doctors are more likely to follow all physician guidance, from managing their diabetes to obtaining regular colon screenings to improving their health.

“The big point from our research is that after the Covid-19 pandemic, the left and right sides are not only split into Covid-19 health issues, but also according to their trust in their own physicians and advice on their health,” says O’Brian. “This broader polarization of trust in medicine is fooled to trust your personal doctor, and in some cases treat chronic illnesses.”

This is surprising as life expectancy stagnated in the US and fell in the early 2020s.

Between 2001 and 2019, academics identified an increasing gap in mortality between Republicans and those living in democratic counties. The democratic county residents lived long.

“If people don’t trust medical institutions or medical professionals, it can make it difficult to solve health problems and potentially make them worse,” Oblien said.

Historically, politics has influenced health policy debates on topics such as reproductive rights and government-sponsored health insurance. However, research data shows that physician-patient relationships remained on political conflict. Trust in doctors was a bipartisan. Republicans trusted doctors as much as Democrats.

When the COVID-19 pandemic emerged in 2020, Oblian saw people line up along the party along public health measures such as vaccines and masking. He suspected that the department also influenced people’s trust in their doctors and their willingness to follow doctors’ recommendations on various health conditions. So he began his investigation.

O’Brian and Kent looked at cross-sectional data, a survey of slices of US voters at various points in time. They discovered that Republicans and Democrats shared trust in doctors until 2020, when Republicans and Democrats began to show more trust in doctors than Republicans.

Researchers then tried to better understand why people’s attitudes have changed.

To test the role the pandemic played in changing attitudes, researchers simulated the divisive nature of the pandemic in an experiment that included 1,150 survey participants.

They randomly presented New York Post headline accusations that Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is a Democrat. They then asked respondents about their trust in their personal physicians.

Groups that saw the headline are more biased along the party line, with Democrats reporting more trust, and Republicans reporting less trust compared to control groups that didn’t see the headline.

Public trust investigations in key institutions such as the press, business and trade unions identified divisions along the party line in the 2010s. One exception was drugs, but similar partisan disparities also appeared in the agency in 2020, O’Brian said.

“We argue that partisan divisions in trust in individual doctors are a response to Covid 19.

Next, the researchers looked into how important physician political affiliation is to patients. It turned out to carry a lot of weight.

In their first experiment, the researchers created two fictional profiles of dermatologists, creating randomly diverse attributes, including race, gender, school attendance, online ratings, and political affiliation. We asked which dermatologist is likely to visit. Both Republican and Democrat respondents preferred doctors who shared political beliefs.

In the second experiment, the researchers observed how 777 study participants responded when they saw their doctor profiles on the physician directory, zocdoc.com. Conservative respondents who saw Conservative Prophecy Sessions were more likely to seek healthcare from their website compared to those who saw Zocdoc.com

O’Brian’s future research explores factors that stimulate patients’ trust in their physicians. He also examines what the doctor’s trust gap means for health outcomes and whether the data shows different health outcomes for Republicans and Democrats.