EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Expert endorsement and the legitimacy of public policy. Evidence from Covid19 mitigation strategies

Francesco Bogliacino, Rafael Charris, Camilo Gómez Cangrejo, Felipe Montealegre () and Cristiano Codagnone

Journal of Risk Research, 2021, vol. 24, issue 3-4, 394-415

Abstract: During a pandemic, the government requires active compliance by citizens. While these demands can be enforced with rewards and punishments, legitimacy allows the government to achieve the same results with greater cost effectiveness. The way in which a government can acquire substantive legitimacy depends on how it communicates and justifies its decisions. In this article, we measure revealed legitimacy, via approval of three potential mitigation strategies against Covid19, when they are defended using expert endorsement, consultation by civil society, and mediation between opposing interests. Our methodological choice was to randomly assign participants to either a non-conflicting priming or to one that emphasizes the risks involved, (e.g. connection between health and economy, uncertainty, and economic costs). The data come from an online experiment we conducted as part of a longitudinal study in several countries. The countries included are Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom. The results show that the support of experts in non-controversial domains is preferred (consensus of value, low uncertainty, diffuse rents). Contrary to our hypotheses, we found that citizen deliberation is not preferred under high epistemic uncertainty, and mediation is either indifferent or not preferred under conflict of value and conflict of interest.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13669877.2021.1881990 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Expert endorsement and the legitimacy of public policy. Evidence from Covid19 mitigation strategies (2021) Downloads
Working Paper: Expert endorsement and the legitimacy of public policy. Evidence from Covid19 mitigation strategies (2021) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:jriskr:v:24:y:2021:i:3-4:p:394-415

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RJRR20

DOI: 10.1080/13669877.2021.1881990

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Risk Research is currently edited by Bryan MacGregor

More articles in Journal of Risk Research from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-23
Handle: RePEc:taf:jriskr:v:24:y:2021:i:3-4:p:394-415