15:30 - 17:45
Friday-Panel
Chair/s:
Anja Neundorf
Discussant/s:
Shared by Panellists
Meeting Room I

William Allen, Jacqueline Broadhead, Mariña Fernández-Reino, Denis Kierans, Isabel Ruiz, Madeleine Sumption
British Attitudes and Welfare Policy Preferences Towards Migrant Labour During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Change or Continuity?

Sergi Pardos-Prado, Anja Neundorf
How to pay for Covid? The impact of the pandemic on preferences for taxes and spending

Catherine De Vries, Francesco Billari, Paula Rettl
COVID-19 and Inter-Generational Conflict

Ari Ray, Francesco Colombo
Trust, Information and Redistributive Preferences in Pandemic Italy
Trust, Information and Redistributive Preferences in Pandemic Italy
Ari Ray 1, Francesco Colombo 2
1 University of Geneva
2 European University Institute

The paper examines how information on collective action affects the social welfare preferences of voters, in the context of the unfolding COVID-19 crisis. What happens to the social welfare preferences of voters when their expectations concerning collective behavior are met, or even exceeded? And what conversely occurs when these expectations are unmet, and their trust is thereby breached? To explore these questions, we design a quasi-experimental survey directed to a representative sample of the Italian voting age population. In it, a randomly assigned subset of respondents is exposed to real-world information on lockdown compliance rates during the peak of the first Italian COVID-19 lockdown (April 2020). Leveraging this (pre-registered) design, we can then examine the extent to which information on compliance rates affects the social policy preferences of voters, conditional on pre-treatment levels of displayed community trust. We examine voter attitudes toward a broad range of welfare policy dimensions, as our main outcomes of interest: these include social policy generosity, conditionality, and universalism, as well as tax financing and tax progressivity. In addition, we perform several mechanism tests to ascertain the potential causes of uncovered causal effects.