Pandemic Balancing Acts: Early COVID-19 lockdown changes how Germans trade off lives and weigh constitutional powers

Abstract

Has the COVID-19 pandemic caused early shifts in how citizens view constitutional power balances and policy tradeoffs? We conducted two survey experiments among 1192 Germans during the first week of lockdown. In a priming experiment, subjects were cued to think about the COVID-19 lockdown. While not affecting their ‘federal vs. state’ power balance preferences, this increased support for shifting power from parliaments toward governments. In a framing experiment, we traded a maximalist imperative for the state to take all measures to minimize casualties against long-term losses in economic wealth or civic freedoms. Support for this maximalist policy was somewhat lower when traded against freedom losses, but was unchanged among the youngest and oldest respondents. Support was substantially lower when traded against economic losses, especially among young respondents. These results document significant initial switches in mass preferences about democratic governance caused by the pandemic. They may also signal looming generational tensions.

COVID-19 Is Examining the EU and the Member States: The Role of Attitudes and Sociodemographic Factors on Citizens’ Support towards National Policies

“…The authors found that Spanish citizens were willing to support drastic measures even if they curtail basic civil liberties, and the anti-COVID-19 measures were more drastically supported than those measures taken against climate change or terrorism. Meanwhile, Tepe et al (2020) analyzed the policy tradeoff preferences of Germans to the response to COVID-19 to minimize the number of deaths, with two interesting treatments giving information to the respondents about the associated costs in terms of: (1) the economy frame-loss of economic wealth caused by insolvencies, unemployment, and public debt; and (2) the freedom frame-long term restrictions of civil liberties (assembly and movement freedoms). The authors found that both treatments reduced the support of the life-saving measures and the economy frame reduction was greater than the freedom frame.…”

A cure worse than the disease? Exploring the health-economy trade-off during COVID-19

“…To the best of our knowledge, by now only three studies have a focus similar to ours in investigating which positions citizens take on the trade-off between protecting public health and limiting economic downturns linked to lockdown policies. Tepe et al (2020), through two experiments on priming and framing fielded in Germany during the first week of lockdown, demonstrate that support for the maximalist human life protection policy was moderately lower when traded against loss in civic freedom, while it was considerably lower when traded against potential economic losses caused by the lockdown policies, particularly for younger respondents. Through a survey experiment conducted in the UK and the US, Hargreaves Heap et al (2020) show that the majority of respondents in the two countries tend to evaluate health more positively than wealth.…”

“…The COVID-19 crisis represents a unique opportunity to study citizens' policy preference formation in 'hard times' (Bermeo and Bartels 2014). While several recent papers have analysed how general levels of public support for national governments changed since the outbreak of the pandemic (among others Altiparmakis et al 2021;Bol et al 2021;Leininger and Schaub 2020;Merkley 2020;Schraff 2020), only a few studies have explored how citizens evaluate governments' particular policy responses (Chorus et al 2020;Hargreaves Heap et al 2020;Tepe et al 2020). To investigate which policy measures citizens would prefer to see adopted in their country to cope with the multifaceted consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, we use a vignette experiment conducted in seven European countries in June 2020.…”

Citizenship as a Form of Anticipatory Obedience? Implications of Preventive Health Policy in Germany

“…Furthermore, ad hoc research with regard to the policy preferences of German citizens revealed that a “large‐scale pandemic can induce a substantial willingness to give up freedom for casualty prevention” (Tepe et al . 2020, 9). As a result, Germany's federal health secretary, Jens Spahn, sought to capitalize politically on the temporarily public mood “to shift power away from parliaments toward governments” (Tepe et al .…”