Professor Margit Tavits' 2022 paper, "Can Policy Responses to Pandemics Reduce Mass Fear?" is now available for Open Access in the Journal of Experimental Political Science by the Cambridge University Press. The article was co-authored with Michael M. Bechtel (University of Cologne) and William O'Brochta (Texas Lutheran University). Read the paper here.
Abstract: To successfully address large-scale public health threats such as the novel coronavirus outbreak, policymakers need to limit feelings of fear that threaten social order and political stability. We study how policy responses to an infectious disease affect mass fear using data from a survey experiment conducted on a representative sample of the adult population in the USA (N = 5,461). We find that fear is affected strongly by the final policy outcome, mildly by the severity of the initial outbreak, and minimally by policy response type and rapidity. These results hold across alternative measures of fear and various subgroups of individuals regardless of their level of exposure to coronavirus, knowledge of the virus, and several other theoretically relevant characteristics. Remarkably, despite accumulating evidence of intense partisan conflict over pandemic-related attitudes and behaviors, we show that effective government policy reduces fear among Democrats, Republicans, and Independents alike.
