Communicating safety precautions can help maintain in-person voter turnout during a pandemic.

Scholars have linked cost and life stress to lower voter turnout with clear implications for voting during the COVID-19 pandemic. We ask whether COVID-19 reduces turnout intention and how election agencies can mitigate this effect. We use a series of six survey and conjoint experiments implemented in samples totalling over 28,000 Canadian respondents collected between July and November of 2020 to show that: 1) priming people to think about COVID-19 reduces turnout intention, especially among those who feel most threatened by the disease; 2) safety measures for in-person voting, such as mandatory masks and physical distancing, can improve safety perceptions and willingness to vote in-person, and 3) providing people information about safety precautions for in-person voting mitigates the negative effect of priming COVID-19. These studies illustrate the importance of both the implementation and communication of measures by election agencies designed to make people safe - and feel safe - while voting in-person.

Citizens' Willingness to Support New Taxes for COVID-19 Measures and the Role of Trust.

The COVID-19 public health pandemic has seen governments spend trillions of dollars to limit the spread of the COVID-19 virus as well as to soften the economic blow from the shutting down of national economies. Subsequent budget shortfalls raise the question of how governments will pay for the direct and indirect costs associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. In this article, we study the public's willingness to contribute through paying a new tax, with a focus on Canada. We find that both generalized social and political trust are associated with a greater willingness to support a COVID-related tax and that generalized social trust, in particular, attenuates the negative effect of an experimentally manipulated, specified level of tax burden on policy support. These findings entail important implications for the public opinion and tax policies literature, as well as for policy makers. RELATED ARTICLES: Gainous, Jason, Stephen C. Craig, and Michael D. Martinez. 2008. "Social Welfare Attitudes and Ambivalence about the Role of Government." Politics & Policy 36 (6): 972-1004. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-1346.2008.00147 Shock, David R. 2013. "The Significance of Opposition Entrepreneurs on Local Sales Tax Referendum Outcomes." Politics & Policy 41 (4): 588-614. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12028 Wagle, Udaya R. 2013. "The Heterogeneity Politics of the Welfare State: Changing Population Heterogeneity and Welfare State Policies in High-Income OECD Countries, 1980-2005." Politics & Policy 41 (6): 947-984. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12053.

VOLUNTAD DE LOS CIUDADANOS PARA APOYAR NUEVOS IMPUESTOS PARA LAS MEDIDAS COVID­19 Y EL PAPEL DE LA CONFIANZA: La pandemia de salud pública COVID­19 hizo que los gobiernos gastaran billones de dólares para limitar la propagación del virus COVID­19, así como para suavizar el golpe económico del cierre de las economías nacionales. Los posteriores déficits presupuestarios plantean la cuestión de cómo pagarán los gobiernos los costos directos e indirectos asociados con la pandemia de COVID­19. En este documento, estudiamos la disposición del público a contribuir mediante el pago de un nuevo impuesto. Encontramos que tanto la confianza social como política generalizada se asocian con una mayor disposición a apoyar un impuesto relacionado con COVID y que la confianza social generalizada en particular atenúa el efecto negativo de un nivel especificado de carga tributaria manipulado experimentalmente sobre el apoyo a las políticas. Estos hallazgos tienen implicaciones importantes para la opinión pública y la literatura sobre políticas fiscales, y también para los responsables de la formulación de políticas.