Trading Liberties: Most citizens do support restricting freedoms in times of crisis

Abstract

Major crises regularly lead to a public debate about whether the government should be able to restrict personal freedoms in the interest of public welfare. Using a factorial survey experiment administered to more than 10,000 online survey respondents in Germany during the COVID crisis, we assess under what conditions citizens are willing to sacrifice individual civil freedoms in the interest of public well-being. Despite highly visible protests against Covid policies, we document broad willingness to accept restrictions on rights alongside sharp heterogeneity with respect to vaccination status and party identification. The majority of citizens are vaccinated and strongly support limitations on freedoms in response to extreme conditions---especially when the vaccinated themselves are exempted from these limitations. The unvaccinated minority generally prefer no restrictions on freedoms regardless of the severity of the pandemic. These policy preferences in turn matter for reported trust in government, in opposite ways for vaccinated and unvaccinated citizens.

Who looks up to the Leviathan? Ideology, political trust, and support for restrictive state interventions in times of crisis

“…When it comes to voters, a case likely can be made that different individuals, in terms of, say, personal traits or political preferences, react in different ways to specific limitations (Collis et al, 2022). While research has shown the presence of generalized effectse.g., lockdowns enforced during the pandemic increased trust in democracy and government across Europe in the shortterm (Bol et al, 2021), and a large majority of citizens support the limitation of individual freedoms during crisespatterns of approval can indeed differ greatly across subgroup categories (Hartmann et al, 2022). For instance, Terry et al (2020) report that younger individuals were more likely to showcase a negative mood toward the pandemic at the beginning of the crisis, Auton and Sturman (2022) demonstrate that greater compliance with COVID-19 restrictions was more likely among more informed respondents, and Modersitzki and colleagues (2021) show that respondents high in extraversion and neuroticism were more likely to perceive measures as more restrictive.…”