Locked Down or Locked In? Institutionalized Public Preferences and Pandemic Policy Feedback in 32 Countries

The Novel Coronavirus Pandemic provides a unique opportunity to test theories of policy feedback in times of national emergency. An important question in this field is whether the discrepancy between public attitudes and emergency rules makes ordinary citizens less likely to comply, which in turn can undermine the goals of national emergency policies such as the recent lockdown. In this study, we first compare 2016 institutionalized non-Covid-related public preferences for government intervention to government actions taken at the outbreak of this pandemic in early March 2020 across 32 middle to high income countries, using aggregated data from the International Social Survey Program and country-level Blavatnik Coronavirus Government Response Tracker data. Then, we use the relative discrepancy between them to predict public behaviors shortly after the initial outbreak in late-March into early April using the Measuring Worldwide COVID-19 Attitudes and Beliefs survey. We find no association between public preferences and government response at the outbreak. In the subsequent stage, we find that, on average, countries with stronger government restrictions had lower levels of risky social behaviours. However, once controlling for this and the equivalent local severity of the pandemic, we also find some tentative evidence that the discrepancy between restrictions and public preferences from the outbreak stage shows a relationship with public behaviours. Where the government took much stronger interventions in the outbreak stage relative to public preferences for non-Covid government interventions, the public were more likely to engage in risky social behaviors, such as going out when asked not to, attending social gatherings, or not keeping a safe distance from others. In contrast, where the government took weaker measures, the public were instead more likely to avoid risky social behaviors. Although we cannot conclude whether this means that the enforced measures were more or less effective, our results may suggest that governments took stronger measures in countries where they expected more risky behaviors and that there may be a tradeoff between institutionalized public preferences and the ability to curtail social behaviours.