Conditional Solidarity - Attitudes towards support for others during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic presents a unique opportunity to study how humans allocate scarce resources in times of hardship. We investigate whether people display selfish or altruistic behaviour and whether their decision making follows the same logic of reciprocal solidarity during this pandemic as deservingness perception research in non-crisis times would suggest. We test these hypotheses for the three central types of policies governments have adopted in response to the COVID-19 crisis: the (potential) rationing of ICU care, the provision of government aid to the self-employed and small businesses, and restrictions on cross-border movements. Three original conjoint survey experiments administered to an incentivised online panel in Switzerland in April/May and again in November/December 2020 show that people indeed base their judgement of who deserves to be included in solidaristic arrangements on an underlying logic of reciprocity and identity, as hypothesised by the literature on deservingness perceptions. In all experiments, contributing to the community, be it through past actions and contributions or current efforts, plays a crucial role in determining an individual’s deservingness as does their nationality (and legal status) with nationals being perceived as more deserving than non-nationals.