Liberté, Égalité, Crédibilité: An experimental study of citizens' perceptions of government responses to COVID‐19 in eight countries

• Published date: 01 March 2023
• Author: Anna A. Amirkhanyan,Kenneth J. Meier,Miyeon Song,Fei W. Roberts,Joohyung Park,Dominik Vogel,Nicola Bellé,Angel Luis Molina,Thorbjørn Sejr Guul
• Date: 01 March 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13588

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Liberté, 

Egalité, Crédibilité: An experimental study

of citizens’perceptions of government responses

to COVID-19 in eight countries

Anna A. Amirkhanyan

1

| Kenneth J. Meier

2

| Miyeon Song

3

| Fei W. Roberts

1

|

Joohyung Park

1

| Dominik Vogel

4

| Nicola Bellé

5

| Angel Luis Molina Jr.

6

|

Thorbjørn Sejr Guul

7

1

Department of Public Administration and

Policy, American University, Washington, District

of Columbia, USA

2

Department of Public Administration and

Policy, American University, Cardiff School of

Business, and Institute of Public Administration,

Leiden University, Washington, District of

Columbia, USA

3

School of Public Affairs and Administration,

Rutgers University –Newark, Newark, New

Jersey, USA

4

Department of Socioeconomics, University of

Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

5

Institute of Management, Scuola Superiore

Sant’Anna, Pisa, Italy

6

School of Public Affairs, Arizona State

University, Phoenix, Arizona, USA

7

Department of Political Science and Public

Management, University of Southern Denmark,

Odense, Denmark

Correspondence

Fei W. Roberts, American University, 4400

Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20016,

USA.

Email: froberts@american.edu

Funding information

American University School of Public Affairs

Abstract

During a global pandemic, individual views of government can be linked to citizens’

trust and cooperation with government and their propensity to resist state policies or

to take action that influences the course of a pandemic. This article explores citizens’

assessments of government responses to COVID-19 as a function of policy substance

(restrictions on civil liberties), information about performance, and socioeconomic

inequity in outcomes. We conducted a survey experiment and analyzed data on over

7000 respondents from eight democratic countries. We find that across countries, citi-

zens are less favorable toward COVID-19 policies that are more restrictive of civil liber-

ties. Additionally, citizens’views of government performance are significantly

influenced by objective performance information from reputable sources and infor-

mation on the disproportionate impacts of COVID-19 on low-income groups. This

study reinforces the importance of policy design and outcomes and the consideration

of multiple public values in the implementation of public policies.

Evidence for Practice

•Policies that limit personal freedoms are disliked and may be resisted by citizens;

therefore, governments can leverage their policy expertise in informing the pub-

lic and promoting responsible self-regulation during public health crises.

•Citizens take performance information from credible sources into account while

forming their opinions about public policies and programs.

•Governments and the leading global public health agencies should be active in

educating the public and addressing misinformation related to the COVID-19

disease and pandemic.

•Policymakers and public administrators should consider equity concerns in the

design and implementation of public programs, as they influence citizens’per-

ceptions of and satisfaction with public programs.

•Citizens do not make trade-offs between the values of restrictiveness, effective-

ness, and equity but rather value each separately, which suggests that policy-

makers and administrations ought to pay attention to multiple public values

simultaneously.

Liberty, equality, credibility: Liberté, 

Egalité, Crédibilité (in French).

Received: 12 August 2021 Revised: 26 October 2022 Accepted: 18 November 2022

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13588

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribu tion and reproduction in any medium, provided the

original work is properly cited.

© 2022 The Authors. Public Administration Review published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Society for Public Administration.

Public Admin Rev. 2023;83:401–418. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/puar 401

INTRODUCTION

The 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) spread to

over 200 countries around the world, resulting in over

6.40 million deaths as of August 2022 (WHO, 2022). With

the vast health, economic, and social impacts of

COVID-19 widely observed, the effects of government

decisions and actions on citizens’attitudes need to be

better understood. As with past pivotal events in history,

policy and administrative solutions designed to contain

the current global pandemic involve perplexing trade-offs

between several core public values, such as safety,

democracy, economic prosperity, equity, and others

(Alsan et al., 2021; Belle & Cantarelli, 2022). Efforts to slow

the spread of the COVID-19 infection have been tied to

limiting freedom of movement, assembly, expression, and

worship (Curley & Federman, 2020); in some cases, they

have related to the centralization and expansion of state

control, censorship, and surveillance. These policies may

be perceived as a threat to the ideas of democracy and

liberalism; therefore, they may further deepen the current

distrust, alienation, and disconnect between the citizens

and the state. Our first objective is to explore citizens’

perceptions of government as a function of the COVID-19

policy substance with a focus on restrictions related to

individual civil liberties.

Communicating information is a necessary element of

co-producing public policies and programs with citizens.

The ability of ordinary citizens, with their preexisting

values, motives, preferences, and biases, to take objective

information into account when assessing government

action during a crisis has not been comprehensively

explored in the current pandemic.

1

Thus, the second

objective of this study is to investigate how information

related to government performance affects citizens’atti-

tudes and whether it moderates the relationship between

restrictive COVID-19 policies and citizens’views. In exam-

ining the information that might affect citizens’judgment,

we focus on both the general data on government perfor-

mance and specific information on the socioeconomic

inequities in COVID-19 outcomes.

We use a randomized experimental design that permits

causal interpretations of relationships between public pol-

icy restrictiveness and performance information, on the

one hand, and citizen assessments of governments’perfor-

mance, on the other. Experimental research has become a

cost-effective tool for studying “morally problematic”or

“taboo”trade-offs and informing policies in public health

and public safety crises (Belle & Cantarelli, 2022;Fiske&

Tetlock, 1997). We survey residents in eight democracies

affected by the pandemic—Canada, Denmark, Germany,

Italy, South Korea, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the

United States—to get meaningful variation in the severity

of the pandemic and institutional structures, as well as

achieve greater generalizability.

We find that citizens across all eight countries evaluate

administrative approaches that place fewer restrictions on

civil liberties more favorably than more restrictive ones.

This finding explains the current challenges and forewarns

of future difficulties in implementing aggressive policies

limiting personal freedoms. Importantly, individual views

of government are also significantly influenced by perfor-

mance information provided by reputable sources as well

as the data on socioeconomic inequity in COVID-19 out-

comes. Overall, respondents’evaluations of government

performance in our study are most sensitive to objective

performance information, followed by policy restrictiveness

and inequality. Finally, objective performance information

does not moderate the effect that policy restrictiveness

has on individual views of government performance.

Our study informs government action and policymaking

in the context of the current and future pivotal events

requiring trade-offs that might undermine democracy.

While externally imposed restrictions on citizens’civil liber-

ties are disliked and may be resisted, governments can

leverage their policy expertise to educate citizens and pro-

mote responsible self-regulation. Citizens are able to appro-

priately discern different dimensions of government

performance and attribute objective performance informa-

tion as it uniquely relates to different aspects of governance

outcomes. Hence, reducing evaluations of citizens’views of

government to one generic measure could miss the impor-

tant nuances in their assessments. Finally, by determining

that citizens in eight countries responded to government

actions and related performance treatments similarly, we

contribute to the knowledge of the generalizability of find-

ings in multinational public administration research.

CITIZENS’PERCEPTIONS OF GOVERNMENT

PERFORMANCE

Citizens’views of government are linked to a wide array

of individual policy-related actions such as paying taxes,

regulatory compliance, coproduction, and public partici-

pation (Christensen & Lægreid, 2005; Marvel, 2015). Dur-

ing a public health crisis, citizen perceptions are positively

associated with coproduction and decision-making that

will influence the course of the pandemic, including wear-

ing face coverings, social distancing, and vaccination. Citi-

zens’compliance with these regulations depends, in part,

on their perceptions of and trust toward their govern-

ment (Bargain & Aminjonov, 2020; Blair et al., 2017).

The literature examining the determinants of citizen

perception of public institutions and actions explores a

range of individual, organizational, and societal factors such

as performance information, anti-public sector bias, media,

administrative processes, individual experiences, and demo-

graphic characteristics (Hvidman & Andersen, 2016;

Marvel, 2015; Meier et al., 2019,2022). Little scholarly work,

however, focuses on how multiple public values and their

conflicts reflected in public policy affect citizen perception

of government. As Nabatchi (2012) points out, government

policy cannot “create public value and prevent public

values failure”without correctly identifying and under-

standing the values that citizens demand for a specific

402 LIBERTÉ, 

EGALITÉ, CRÉDIBILITÉ