Department of Social and Political Sciences, Bocconi University, Milan, Italy; O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, Georgetown Law Center, Washington, District of Columbia, USA.
Soc Sci Med. 2023 May;324:115840. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2023.115840. Epub 2023 Mar 16.
Can messaging that emphasizes the costs of COVID-19 increase popular support for more proactive public health policies? People who experience disasters often become more supportive of policies to address their underlying causes, and the pandemic may have similar spillover effects for public opinion. To test this idea, the study implements a survey experiment in Italy, Germany, and the United States in which half of the respondents were randomly assigned to a prime about the impact of the pandemic prior to answering questions about their support for public health policies. The results show that respondents who received the prime became more favorable toward increased government spending on domestic and foreign public health programs alike. These treatment effects were consistent across countries, across two different surveys in the United States conducted at different points in time, and across partisan subgroups. However, the treatment did not consistently increase support for more active and intrusive government policies to address specific public health challenges like smoking or HIV/AIDS. The results suggest that public health advocates may benefit from messaging that connects COVID-19 to the need for public health funding beyond the context of the pandemic.
强调 COVID-19 成本的信息能否增加公众对更积极主动的公共卫生政策的支持？经历灾难的人通常会更支持解决其根本原因的政策，而大流行可能对舆论产生类似的溢出效应。为了检验这一想法，该研究在意大利、德国和美国实施了一项调查实验，其中一半的受访者被随机分配到一个关于大流行影响的预测试题，然后再回答他们对公共卫生政策的支持程度。结果表明，接受预测试题的受访者对增加国内外公共卫生计划的政府支出变得更加有利。这些治疗效果在各国之间、在美国进行的两次不同调查中（在不同的时间点进行）以及在不同的党派群体中都是一致的。然而，这种治疗并没有始终如一地增加对更积极和更具侵入性的政府政策的支持，以应对特定的公共卫生挑战，如吸烟或艾滋病毒/艾滋病。结果表明，公共卫生倡导者可能受益于将 COVID-19 与大流行之外的公共卫生资金需求联系起来的信息传递。
