Can Policy Responses to Pandemics Reduce Mass Fear?

Abstract

To successfully address large-scale public health threats such as the novel coronavirus outbreak, policymakers need to limit feelings of fear and anxiety that threaten social order and political stability. We study how policy response to an infectious disease affects mass fear using data from a survey experiment conducted on a representative sample of the adult population in the United States (N=5,461). We find that fear and anxiety are strongly affected by the final policy outcome, relatively mildly by the severity of the initial outbreak, and minimally by policy response type and rapidity. This result holds across various subgroups of individuals regardless of their partisan identification, level of exposure to coronavirus, knowledge of the virus, and several other theoretically relevant characteristics.

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