Too Harsh for Me but Not for Thee? Threat Control, Personal Freedom, and Perception of Pandemic Policy

Abstract

Policies implemented to control the COVID-19 (C19) pandemic have faced public resistance. We examined this issue via an experimental vignette study embedded in a May 2020 national (U.S.) survey conducted by YouGov. Specifically, we explore how the public perceived a local policymaker proposing a C19-related isolation policy, based on the policy’s invasiveness or its punitivity. We find that more intrusive and more punitive policies generally resulted in colder feelings towards, and harsher perceptions of, the policymaker. However, our results suggest that the main driver of public sentiment towards the policymaker was the invasiveness of the proposed policy, with the policy's punitivity being less impactful. We discuss these findings in relation to policymaking, policy support and compliance, and tradeoffs between informal/formal controls, and intrusive/punitive policies.

Keywords:

• COVID-19
• public opinion
• survey experiment
• legitimacy
• perceptions

Notes

1 However, Kleck and Jackson (2017, p. 1584) have questioned the generalizability of these findings, suggesting that “rather than being a response to real crime levels or actual exposure to crime, punitiveness is more likely to be a response to exposure to news media coverage of crime and a politically conservative context.”

2 We use the terms plan and policy interchangeably.

3 As noted earlier, both police checkpoints (Austen, 2021; Frost, 2021; Georgieva et al., 2021; Reuters, 2021) and cell phone GPS tracking (Garrett et al., 2021; Sabat et al., 2020; Singh, 2020) have been proposed or implemented to ensure isolation, quarantine, and lockdown compliance in multiple countries around the world. Koops and colleagues (2018) provides an excellent cross-national discussion of different types of privacy infringement by law enforcement.

4 Feelings had a Skewness of -.07 and a Kurtosis of 1.66, while the Harshness had a Skewness of -.21 and a Kurtosis of 2.54.

5 For readers less familiar with the Fahrenheit scale, 66.68 degrees is roughly room temperature in winter if you are responsible for paying the heating bill, or room temperature in summer if someone else is paying the air conditioner/electric bill.

6 While the outcome was measured using a 7-point Likert scale, a Brant test suggested the parallel regression assumption was not violated (χ² = 29.10; p = .09), and thus an OLS regression model was suitable.