The SARS-CoV-2 virus was first identified in Wuhan, China, in late December 2019, and it quickly spread to many countries. By March 2020, the virus had triggered a global pandemic (World Health Organization, 2020). In response to this crisis, governments have implemented unprecedented public health measures. The success of these policies will largely depend on the public's willingness to comply with new rules. A key factor in citizens’ willingness to comply is their understanding of the data that motivate government action. In this study, we examine how different ways of presenting these data visually can affect citizen's perceptions, attitudes and support for public policy.

Recent research about the decision to vote or abstain finds a causal effect of social networks and social pressure. Yet this literature does not examine how this social pressure is exerted and by whom. This study aims at correcting these shortcomings. Using a two-wave panel survey conducted in Canada, we distinguish between the pressure exerted by friends and the partner and between descriptive and injunctive norms. We find that most people are not subjected to strong injunctive pressure, social pressure is most prominent in the household (between partners), it is mostly descriptive, and it has a powerful effect.

In public health crises, the media and governments routinely share statistical analyses with the public. In the COVID-19 pandemic, the tool most commonly used to convey statistical information about the spread of the virus has been time-series graphs about the cumulative number of cases. When drawing such graphs, analysts have to make design decisions which can have dramatic effects on citizens’ interpretations. Plotting the COVID-19 progression on a linear scale highlights an exponential “explosion” in the number of cases, whereas plotting the number of cases on a logarithmic scale produces a line with a modest-looking slope. Even if the two graphs display the exact same information, differences in visual design may lead people to different substantive conclusions. In this study, we measure the causal effect of different visualization design choices on Canadians’ views about the crisis. We report results from a survey experiment conducted in April 2020 with a sample of 2500 respondents. We find that no matter how the information is presented, Canadians are united in supporting drastic confinement measures and in accepting that these measures will not be removed soon.

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Citizens are increasingly involved in the design of democratic institutions, for instance via referendums. If they support the institution that best serves their self-interest, the outcome inevitably advantages the largest group and disadvantages minorities. In this paper, we challenge this pessimistic view with an original lab experiment in France and Great Britain. In the first phase, experimental subjects experience elections under plurality and approval voting. In the second phase, they decide which rule they want to use for extra elections. The treatment is whether they do or do not have information to determine where their self-interest lies before deciding. We find that self-interest shapes people’s decisions, but so do intrinsic egalitarian values that subjects have outside of the lab. The implications are: (1) people have consistent ‘value-driven preferences’ for electoral rules, and (2) putting them in a situation of uncertainty leads to an outcome that reflects these values.