What are the consequences of political polarization for medicine and public health? While affective polarization has reshaped elections and policy debates, we know less about whether it penetrates professional domains built on trust, neutrality, and expertise. This project examines how partisan identity structures beliefs, clinical interactions, and public health environments in the United States.  Using national surveys of physicians and the public, embedded experiments, geographic analyses of physician partisanship, and clinician focus groups, Pacheco investigates whether partisan cues shape evaluations of seriousness, communication, and trust; how partisanship structures beliefs about medicine’s social mission; and whether communities differ in public health contexts based on the partisan composition of their physician workforce. Together, the findings suggest that polarization extends beyond politics to influence professional authority, patient experience, and the civic foundations of health.

Julianna Pacheco is professor of political science at the University of Iowa. She received a Ph.D. in political science from Penn State and postdoctoral training as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar at the University of Michigan. She is currently a Carnegie Fellow 2024–2026 and part of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Interdisciplinary Research Leaders Program-Cohort 7.  Her research sits at the nexus of political science and population health. She was among the first to examine how health shapes political participation, most notably finding that poor health reduces turnout.