When health priorities beat civil liberties
During major crises, two core government functions – the protection of civil liberties and the provision of public goods – can come into conflict. With a team of researchers from Bocconi University and Harvard University, we have conducted a large survey administered to more than 500,000 people in 15 countries around the world (including China, the United States, Japan, Canada, Australia, India, Singapore, Italy, and many other European countries), over the period from March 2020 to January 2021, to study how citizens think about the trade-off between civil liberties and public health in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic: What are citizens willing to sacrifice, and what are they steadfast in supporting no matter what the circumstances? How does this vary across countries, between individuals within countries, and over time? How do threats to health security affect this trade-off, and what does variation in the willingness to sacrifice rights across groups reveal about social inequality?
Our data shows that a large fraction of people around the world were willing to curtail civil liberties - such as sacrificing their own rights and freedoms, or limit freedom of the press - in order to improve public health conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Aggregating the data for all the countries in our study, we find that more than 80% of respondents reported being willing to sacrifice at least some of their own rights during a crisis like the current one.
But citizens from different countries differed substantially in their overall willingness to see their civil liberties curtailed: the citizens of Japan and the US, for instance, tended to be among the least willing to sacrifice civil liberties in exchange for improved public health conditions. Conversely, the citizens of China seemed to be among the most willing to do so. EU citizens tended to fall somewhere in between.
At the same time, respondents across a wide range of countries agreed on the relative importance of different core civil liberties. People reported being least willing to give up their right to privacy or activities central to democracy, and most willing to endure personal restrictions or economic losses.
We further find that within countries with strong pre-pandemic civil liberty protections, the tendency to hold onto rights such as privacy protection is stronger among those individuals who have past exposure to regimes that limited freedom and rights. In South Korea, respondents whose parents or grandparents fled the North Korean regime were substantially less willing to sacrifice their rights. Similarly, among German respondents, those born in the former East German regime became less willing to sacrifice rights over the course of the pandemic as compared to their West German counterparts.
In general, we find that individuals who are more concerned about their health or the health of their community are much more willing to sacrifice general and specific rights as well as allowing the government to infringe upon the rights of others. Supplementary analyses comparing observably similar regions that experienced larger vs. smaller pandemic surges, and which compared individuals randomly assigned to a control vs. an information intervention that made salient the public health risks of an uncontained pandemic, suggest the relationship is causal: heightened health insecurity induced by the experiment (or induced by increased mortality from COVID-19 in one's region), leads to a statistically significant 16 percentage-point increase in the willingness to sacrifice one's own rights and freedoms.
How can we interpret these findings? The findings suggest that many citizens - even in liberal democracies - do not view civil liberties as "sacred values". Instead, most citizens put substantial weight both on the public health ramifications caused by an uncontained pandemic, as well as on the cost to civil liberties deriving from strict public health measures.