Do the public support ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ public policies? Trends during Covid-19 and implications for the future

Early in the pandemic, the public accepted considerable state intervention to stop the spread of Covid-19. This was a puzzle of sorts, given the prevailing wisdom that people prefer to be nudged and avoid restrictions and financial costs. We revisit and update the evidence presented in Banerjee et al., (2021), which explored the factors that explain public preferences for ‘soft’ (nudge) versus ‘hard’ (laws, bans) policies. We report that public support for ‘hard’ policies appears to have steadily declined since mid-2020. New insights reflect the importance of partisanship and risk perceptions for individual preferences for ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ policies. We find little evidence of spillover effects from Covid-19 policy preferences to environmental policy preferences; but also, no evidence of crowding out in terms of policy agendas. We conclude with a series of questions that shape the future research agenda, where much is still to be learned about how and why policy preferences evolve over time.