  On April 16th, The White House launched "Opening up America Again" (OuAA)
campaign while many U.S. counties had stay-at-home orders in place. We created
a panel data set of 1,563 U.S. counties to study the impact of U.S. counties'
stay-at-home orders on community mobility before and after The White House's
campaign to reopen the country. Our results suggest that before the OuAA
campaign stay-at-home orders brought down time spent in retail and recreation
businesses by about 27% for typical conservative and liberal counties. However,
after the launch of OuAA campaign, the time spent at retail and recreational
businesses in a typical conservative county increased significantly more than
in liberal counties (15% increase in a typical conservative county Vs. 9%
increase in a typical liberal county). We also found that in conservative
counties with stay-at-home orders in place, time spent at retail and
recreational businesses increased less than that of conservative counties
without stay-at-home orders. These findings illuminate to what extent
residents' political ideology could determine to what extent they follow local
orders and to what extent the White House's OuAA campaign polarized the
obedience between liberal and conservative counties. The silver lining in our
study is that even when the federal government was reopening the country, the
local authorities that enforced stay-at-home restrictions were to some extent
effective.
