The political cost of sanctions: Evidence from COVID-19Andrea Fazio (), Tommaso Reggiani () and Fabio Sabatini Health Policy, 2022, vol. 126, issue 9, 872-878 Abstract: We use survey data to study how trust in government and consensus for the pandemic policy response vary with the propensity for altruistic punishment in Italy, the early epicenter of the pandemic. Approval for the management of the crisis decreases with the size of the penalties that individuals would like to see enforced for lockdown violations. People supporting stronger punishment are more likely to consider the government’s reaction to the pandemic as insufficient. However, after the establishment of tougher sanctions for risky behaviors, we observe a sudden flip in support for the government. Higher amounts of the desired fines become associated with a higher probability of considering the COVID policy response as too extreme, lower trust in government, and lower confidence in the truthfulness of the officially provided information. These results suggest that lockdowns entail a political cost that helps explain why democracies may adopt epidemiologically suboptimal policies. Keywords: COVID-19; Lockdown; Law enforcement; Altruistic punishment; Survey data (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:hepoli:v:126:y:2022:i:9:p:872-878 DOI: 10.1016/j.healthpol.2022.06.008 Access Statistics for this article Health Policy is currently edited by Katrien Kesteloot, Mia Defever and Irina Cleemput More articles in Health Policy from Elsevier |
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