IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nsr/niesrd/528.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Be kind or take it on the chin? Political narratives, pandemics, and social distancing

Author

Listed:
  • Kartik Anand
  • Prasanna Gai
  • Edmund Lou
  • Sherry X. Wu

Abstract

How does a political leader's messaging during a pandemic influence social distancing by citizens? We model the strategic choice of narrative in a beauty contest setting where the leader seeks to eliminate the disease. The leader's resolve to eliminate the disease affects her narrative in a non-linear way. A resolute leader adopts a highly partisan narrative that identifies strongly with her followers, albeit at the expense of her payoff, while an ambivalent leader with low resolve for eliminating the disease is less partisan. Our result speaks to the debate on the voluntary acceptance of limits to individual liberty during a pandemic.

Suggested Citation

  • Kartik Anand & Prasanna Gai & Edmund Lou & Sherry X. Wu, 2021. "Be kind or take it on the chin? Political narratives, pandemics, and social distancing," National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) Discussion Papers 528, National Institute of Economic and Social Research.
    • Handle: RePEc:nsr:niesrd:528
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.niesr.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/NIESR-DP528_0-4.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Beauty contests; pandemic; COVID-19; political narratives; leadership;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D7 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making
    • D84 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Expectations; Speculations
    • D91 - Microeconomics - - Micro-Based Behavioral Economics - - - Role and Effects of Psychological, Emotional, Social, and Cognitive Factors on Decision Making
    • H12 - Public Economics - - Structure and Scope of Government - - - Crisis Management
    • I12 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Health Behavior

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nsr:niesrd:528. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Library & Information Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/niesruk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.