Social acceptance of policy instrument design during times of crisis

Disasters create challenges for governments as they need to design effective and legitimate policy instruments to deal with the crisis. In this paper, we analyze social acceptance of regulations and financial investments in crisis governance, taking the example of the COVID-19 pandemic. By using data from two survey experiments in Switzerland, we show that respondents support rules that temporarily centralize decision-making power to the national level but object to regulations that would make contact tracing efforts mandatory. The data shows also that citizens support financial investments of tax money to prevent future crises. Those who are afraid of the health consequences of the crisis are especially favorable to stricter regulations and financial investment, whereas economic worries related to the crisis specifically and political ideology in general barely explain variance in support for crisis responses. In general, this research contributes to our understanding of how survey experiments can be used to analyze social acceptance of policy instrument design. © 2023 Policy Studies Organization.

Policy integration, problem-solving, and the coronavirus disease crisis: lessons for policy design

The coronavirus disease pandemic has exposed differences in the capacity of governments around the world to integrate and coordinate different policy instruments into a coherent response. In this article, we conceptualize and empirically examine policy integration in responses to the coronavirus disease crisis in 35 countries. We then discuss how the interplay between restrictions, health protection, and economic policy has been articulated between, on the one hand, a policy design based on the complementarity of pro-public health and pro-economy measures, implying an integrated response, and, on the other, a policy design based on the perception of an inherent trade-off between the two. Finally, we discuss three implications from our analysis of policy integration against the coronavirus disease crisis for the post-COVID state: (a) the normalization and adaptation of integrated crisis responses;(b) the possible acceleration and "catching up" of problem-solving capacity as governments may use the crisis as an instance to put into place new social policies;and (c) policy integration as an accelerator of policy complexity and resistance against technocracy in the post-COVID state.