Preferences matter! Political Responses to the COVID-19 and Population’s Preferences

Etienne Dagorn, Martina Dattilo and Matthieu Pourieux
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Martina Dattilo: Univ Rennes, CNRS, CREM - UMR 6211, F-35000 Rennes, France

Economics Working Paper Archive (University of Rennes & University of Caen) from Center for Research in Economics and Management (CREM), University of Rennes, University of Caen and CNRS

Abstract: This paper aims to document the drivers of governments’ political responses in the context of the covid-19 first wave. We test the hypothesis that populations’ economic preferences - risk, time and pro-social preferences - matter both in terms of the governments’ responsiveness and its stringency. Our empirical analysis combines data on worldwide political responses from the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker, individual economic preferences from the Global Preferences Survey, and the 6th and 7th waves of the World Values Surveys. Our final sample consists in 109 countries. We find that trust is an important driver of both aspects of political responses. First, countries with high levels of trust wait longer before implementing their first policy to tackle the epidemic. On the contrary, other preferences (risk, time and altruism) do not relate to responsiveness. Second, all measures of preferences positively relate to the intensity of the political responses in the middle to long-run, though at different periods of time. In the short-run, only patience and interpersonal trust are (negatively) related to policies’ stringency.

Keywords: COVID; -; Political; Responses; -; Economic; Preferences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D63 D64 D91 I12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pol
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