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Two Working Papers from the HOPE project published

How Democracies Cope with COVID19

Early adoption of face masks in Denmark during COVID-19:
Assessing risk-compensation through psychological predictors, behavioral correlates and interrupted time-series analyses

Abstract

A major concern during the COVID-19 pandemic has been whether the use of face masks leads to risk-compensation, i.e., generates false feelings of safety such that masks users relax other protective behaviors. Such concerns have, in particular, been prominent in countries where public use of face masks have not been traditionally recommended. In this paper, we assess the evidence for risk-compensation in such a country, Denmark, where the public use of face masks until recently was at a minimum. Using subsets of a large nationally representative collected at a daily basis (total N = 59,728), we demonstrate that face mask use is positively predicted by feelings of threat and negatively predicted by negative evaluations of the efficacy of the Danish health authorities general advice, suggesting masks are adopted as an additional layer of protection among those who feel threatened by COVID-19. Furthermore, we find that face mask use correlates positively with self-reported compliance with hygiene and distancing recommendations. However, people who use face masks also report higher infection-relevant contacts. This could suggest that people use face masks where they cannot keep a distance but can also be interpreted as risk-compensation, depending on the causal relationship between face mask use and contact behavior. To gauge causality, we use an interrupted time-series analyses to examine the effect of two changes in the Danish health authorities' policies on face mask use in public transportation. These changes, which occurred in response to rising infection numbers, lead to increased use and, importantly, increased rather than decreased compliance with other advice. These analyses suggest that in situations of rising infections national health authorities can recommend the use of face masks without concern for risk-compensation.  

Link to paper: “Early adoption of face masks”

    

Lockdown Evaluations During the First Wave of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Government responses against COVID-19 has been met with salient protests across multiple Western democracies. Such protests have received significant media attention but we know little about the extent to which they reflect the views of the broader public. To fill this lacuna, this manuscript investigates how citizens across a number of Western democracies evaluate the interventions imposed by their government to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. Relying on large-scale, representative surveys from eight countries (Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, United Kingdom, United States and Sweden), we investigate how pandemic-specific and broader political attitudes correlate with support for government lockdowns in the first wave of the pandemic (March 19 -- April 8), a period hallmarked by stringent policies in all of our countries. We find medium to high levels of government support in all eight countries. Furthermore, our results suggest that these levels of support are generated by a unique coalition of fearful, prosocial and knowledgable individuals. While such groups are often political opponents, the unprecedented nature of the COVID-19 pandemic aligns their interests.  

Link to paper: ”Lockdown Evaluations During the First Wave of the Covid-19 Pandemic”

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The project is supported by the CarlsbergFoundation