Government reputational effects of COVID-19 public health actions: A job opportunity evaluation conjoint experiment

Abstract

The tradeoff between short-term economic and public health has been very salient in debates surrounding U.S. government responses to COVID-19. But highly salient choices by very visible executive branch leaders, like state COVID-19 public health actions, have implications beyond current economic performance. We argue that by shaping perceptions of state governments, or state “reputations”, these responses may affect how individuals evaluate economic opportunities in different states. To examine this possibility, we conducted a conjoint experiment presenting subjects with different pairs of job opportunities varying many attributes of the location, job and the state governor’s response to COVID-19. We find that individuals evaluate job opportunities more favorably when a state governor has more aggressively mandated social distancing measures. These effects are largest for individuals concerned about COVID-19 and Democrats, but even Republicans prefer jobs in states where the governor took some meaningful action compared to making a purely symbolic statement. Our findings indicate that governors and their advisors should consider how their COVID-19 responses shape state reputations, which ultimately have consequences for economic performance beyond the immediate crisis.

Behavioral brittleness: the case for strategic behavioral public policy

“…It is worth noting that interventions can suffer simultaneously from multiple, compounding forms of brittleness. In the case of Covid-19, for example, entreaties to wear masks have struggled to overcome the perceived denial of personal liberties or conflation of mask-wearing with political beliefs (Sunstein, 2020a)a manifestation of potential contextual brittlenesswhile conflicts between national-scale public health recommendations from the US Center for Disease Control (CDC) that contradicted local-scale directives coming from individual businesses or municipal officials (Nelson & Witko, 2020) indicated the potential for systemic brittleness.…”

“…The extreme and varied conditions that shaped behavioral responses to the pandemicprolonged and persistent uncertainty, waves of often contradictory approaches (Nelson & Witko, 2020), and a high level of global variability that hampered generalizability (Iwuoha & Aniche, 2020;Nicola et al, 2020) reinforce that behavioral design cannot, and should not, be expected to manage such challenges on its own (Thaler, 2016). In the USA, for example, efforts to bolster public health recommendations about wearing masks were stymied by system-level supply issues, in addition to the entrenched effects of personal autonomy and political identity that fed reactance against nudges and appeals to social norms.…”