Abstract
Under what conditions do citizens support coercive public policies? Although recent research suggests that people prefer policies that preserve freedom of choice, such as behavioural nudges, many citizens accepted stringent policy interventions like fines and mandates to promote vaccination during the COVID-19 pandemic—a pattern that may be linked to the unusually high effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines. We conducted a large online survey experiment (N = 42,417) in the Group of Seven (G-7) countries investigating the relationship between a policy’s effectiveness and public support for stringent policies. Our results indicate that public support for stringent vaccination policies increases as vaccine effectiveness increases, but at a modest scale. This relationship flattens at higher levels of vaccine effectiveness. These results suggest that intervention effectiveness can be a significant predictor of support for coercive policies but only up to some threshold of effectiveness.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 1748 |
| Pages (from-to) | 1-8 |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| Journal | Scientific Reports |
| Volume | 14 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 19 Jan 2024 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We acknowledge generous support from the British Academy. We appreciate the feedback from participants at the Elections, Public Opinion and Parties Conference 2023. We thank the editor and two anonymous referees for their suggestions and comments.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2024, The Author(s).
Funding
We acknowledge generous support from the British Academy. We appreciate the feedback from participants at the Elections, Public Opinion and Parties Conference 2023. We thank the editor and two anonymous referees for their suggestions and comments.