Understanding compliance as multi-faceted: Values and practices during the COVID-19 pandemic in Austria

In some countries, far ranging ‘lock down’ measures to contain the spread of the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic were implemented early on. In Austria, these early measures were met with an extraordinary high degree of compliance among the country’s population. In this paper, we draw upon qualitative interviews, and ask how people made sense of the containment measures during the first lockdown in April 2020 and what shaped their compliance. Empirical research so far has tried to explain compliance with personal dispositions and motivations as well as demographic and social characteristics. Instead of focussing on who is compliant, we aim to understand how people are compliant (or not). We do so by conceptually approaching compliance through the concepts of values and practice. First, our findings indicate that people assess whether measures are suitable, legitimate, or even convenient against the values of science, the law and morality. Second, people assign additional personal value to compliance by stressing its positive implications on their personal lives. By providing a nuanced perspective on compliance as inextricably linked to peoples’ values and practices, our paper critically contributes to the political and scholarly discussion of pandemic public health measures. Understanding compliance through the concept of values shows how people make sense of the measures in the context of their everyday lives and moves away from a binary understanding of (non-)compliance that has been morally charged.