Abstract

During a pandemic, the government requires active compliance by citizens. While these demands can be enforced with rewards and punishments, legitimacy allows the government to achieve the same results with greater cost effectiveness. The way in which a government can acquire substantive legitimacy depends on how it communicates and justifies its decisions. In this article, we measure revealed legitimacy, via approval of three potential mitigation strategies against Covid19, when they are defended using expert endorsement, consultation by civil society, and mediation between opposing interests. Our methodological choice was to randomly assign participants to either a non-conflicting priming or to one that emphasizes the risks involved, (e.g. connection between health and economy, uncertainty, and economic costs). The data come from an online experiment we conducted as part of a longitudinal study in several countries. The countries included are Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom. The results show that the support of experts in non-controversial domains is preferred (consensus of value, low uncertainty, diffuse rents). Contrary to our hypotheses, we found that citizen deliberation is not preferred under high epistemic uncertainty, and mediation is either indifferent or not preferred under conflict of value and conflict of interest.

摘要

在大流行期间，政府要求公民积极遵守。尽管可以通过奖励和惩罚来执行这些要求，但合法性使政府能够以更高的成本效益实现相同的结果。政府获得实质性合法性的方式取决于其沟通方式和决策依据。在本文中，我们通过批准针对Covid19的三种潜在缓解策略来衡量所揭示的合法性，这些策略是通过专家认可，民间社会的协商以及对立的利益之间的调停来捍卫的。我们的方法选择是将参加者随机分配给一个无冲突的启动机构，或者是一个强调所涉及风险的启动机构（例如，健康与经济，不确定性和经济成本之间的联系）。数据来自我们在几个国家进行的纵向研究的一部分进行的在线实验。包括的国家是意大利，西班牙和英国。结果表明，优先选择非争议领域的专家（价值共识，低不确定性，分散租金）。与我们的假设相反，我们发现在较高的认知不确定性下，公民协商不是首选，在价值冲突和利益冲突下，调解不是冷漠的，也不是首选。