Preferences matter! Political Responses to the COVID-19 and Population’s Preferences

This paper aims to document the drivers of governments’ political responses in the context of the covid-19 first wave. We test the hypothesis that populations’ economic preferences - risk, time and pro-social preferences - matter both in terms of the governments’ responsiveness and its stringency. Our empirical analysis combines data on worldwide political responses from the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker, individual economic preferences from the Global Preferences Survey, and the 6th and 7th waves of the World Values Surveys. Our final sample consists in 109 countries. We find that trust is an important driver of both aspects of political responses. First, countries with high levels of trust wait longer before implementing their first policy to tackle the epidemic. On the contrary, other preferences (risk, time and altruism) do not relate to responsiveness. Second, all measures of preferences positively relate to the intensity of the political responses in the middle to long-run, though at different periods of time. In the short-run, only patience and interpersonal trust are (negatively) related to policies’ stringency.