Abstract
Policies adopted to curb the spread of COVID-19 impose limits on individual freedom and although some citizens have consistently supported containment policy, others have resisted. Beyond political orientation, however, little research has explored the attitudinal basis of support for stringent virus containment policy. We argue that individuals with high levels of public service motivation (PSM) will more readily accept the sacrifices entailed by containment policy and thereby express stronger support for it. Second, we argue that the positive relationship between PSM and containment policy support is both mediated by trust in government and moderated by bureaucratic personality, the latter denoting a favorable orientation towards rules in general. Using a country-wide sample of 568 South Korean citizens collected in the fall of 2021, we estimate a conditional process model of support for COVID-19 policy stringency. We find that PSM has both a direct and indirect relationship with support via trust in government and that the indirect effect is moderated by bureaucratic personality, though not in the expected direction. We also report the results of a post hoc analysis which suggests interesting differences in how individuals evaluate rules that limit individual versus organizational freedom.
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Notes on contributors
Yongjin Ahn
Yongjin Ahn is a research fellow at Civic Leadership Education and Research (CLEAR) Initiative at the University of Southern California. His research focuses on public management, behavioral public administration, and bureaucratic politics. His recent research is centered on the intersection of bureaucratic motivation and citizens’ perceptions of policy implementation.
Jesse W. Campbell
Jesse W. Campbell teaches Public Administration at Incheon National University in South Korea. He is interested in comparative public administration, and specifically in identifying features of the national administrative context that determine the initiation, configuration, and effectiveness of administrative reform. He is also interested in issues with unique relevance to Korean public administration.