Public Acceptance of Paternalistic Policies

Policymaking often faces a tension between promoting welfare and respecting personal autonomy. While public attitudes toward "nudges" have been extensively explored, we lack studies on how different philosophical justifications affect acceptance of more traditional paternalistic interventions - policies that restrict individual choice through bans, mandates, or direct regulations. This study explores how different types of paternalistic intervention and their justifications affect public acceptance across two countries with different political cultures and welfare state traditions: the United States and Norway. We survey 2000 respondents in each country. Employing a between-subject design, we examine whether respondents are more willing to accept hard versus soft paternalism in scenarios where they are matched with a hypothetical person and must make a choice whether to intervene and restrict that person’s choice or not. Intervention can happen because the respondent disagrees with the person’s values or preferences (hard paternalism), or else because they disagree with the means that the person chooses to achieve their goals, if those means are likely to defeat those ends (soft paternalism). This part of the study captures internal validity. Second, respondents evaluate several policies across domains, including casino bans, sugar taxes, mandatory vaccination, and pension regulations. Using a between-subjects design, we manipulate the type of justification provided for the paternalistic policies, including welfarism, utilitarianism, and moralism. We investigate how these justifications affect public support, perceptions of autonomy loss, legitimacy, and intrusiveness, while exploring how institutional trust and political affiliation mediate these relationships. This part of the study focuses on external validity.