15 Arya Budi, Warih Aji Pamungkas: Partisanship in Crisis: Public Response to Covid-19 Pandemic in Indonesia Partisanship in Crisis: Public Response to Covid-19 Pandemic in Indonesia Arya Budi 1 , Warih Aji Pamungkas 2 1 Department of Politics and Government, Universitas Gadjah Mada, and Department of Political Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (email: aryabudi@ugm.ac.id and abudi2@illinois.edu) 2 Laboratory of Big Data Analytics, Department of Politics and Government, Universitas Gadjah Mada (email: warih.aji.p@mail.ugm.ac.id) Abstract Given the fact that in a context of crises, people are concerned with their safety, among other things, partisan response toward policies and public leaders is an intriguing topic. This article examines the extent to which partisanship pertains to the time of the Covid-19 pandemic. We employ natural language processing (NLP) and social network analysis (SNA) on Twiter data to analyse public responses toward prominent political leaders, namely, Indonesian President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) and Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan (Anies), in handling the crisis of the Covid-19 pandemic in Indonesia. We then put the social media analysis in a framework of political partisanship. Our sentiment analysis through NLP across time and categories found that supports and demands towards the two public fgures indicate positive and negative partisanship that replicates previous electoral supports. Similarly, our SNA indicates a high polarization rate among the accounts connected with the two leaders in response to the crisis. Extended analysis of the accounts who are at the epicentres of the sentiment conversations, either positive or negative about Jokowi and Anies, reveals that there are connections with their past political support. Though we fnd negative partisan responses for both leaders, a type of hard-core partisanship has been leveraged for Jokowi but not for Anies. We conclude that electoral polarization contributes to the extent to which partisanship responses circulate in a context of crisis. Keywords: partisanship; polarization; covid-19; twiter; Indonesia Jurnal Ilmu Sosial dan Ilmu Politik Volume 24, Issue 1, July 2020 (15-32) ISSN 1410-4946 (Print), 2502-7883 (Online) doi: 10.22146/jsp.52770 Introduction A group protesting against the stay-at- home order regarding the Covid-19 pandemic erupted in Michigan, United States of America, on April 15, 2020. News reports and social media posts around the globe, hereafter, portrayed a series of similar demonstrations in other places in the United States of America. Further news investigation reveals that the sympathizers of Donald Trump were behind the protests (see, for instance, Reid, 2020). Partisanship response in a context of crisis—a situation where people were concerned with their safety, among other things—is an intriguing fact. As Page and Shapiro (1983) suggested a long time ago that “public opinion is often a proximate cause of policy, afecting policy more than policy infuences opinion”, it is imperative to systematically investigate further in other places with particular contexts. To what extent does partisanship occur and circulate in the context of crisis? How do such partisan responses shape the whole response during the crisis of the Covid-19 pandemic? And what is the explanation(s) of such partisan responses? Related to these questions, we seek to investigate partisanship in Indonesian contexts,