Major crises — from terrorist attacks to outbreaks of disease — bring the trade-off between individual civil liberties and national security or well-being into sharp relief. In this paper, we study to what extent individual preferences for protecting rights and civil liberties are elastic to health insecurity. We design and conduct representative surveys involving approximately 550,000 responses across 15 countries, including China and the United States, during many months of the COVID-19 pandemic, from March 2020 until January 2021. We document significant heterogeneity across countries and demographic groups in willingness to sacrifice rights for public welfare. Citizens disadvantaged by income, education, or race are less willing to sacrifice rights than their more advantaged peers in every country, as are those with prior experience in communist regimes. Leveraging naturally-occurring variation as well as experimental approaches, we estimate that a one standard deviation increase in health security concerns increases willingness to sacrifice civil liberties by approximately 72%-92% of the difference between the average Chinese and U.S. citizen. Stated preferences correlate with observed behavior including demand for tracing apps, donations, and petitions.

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Marcella Alsan is a Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. Alsan received a BA from Harvard University, a master’s in public health from Harvard School of Public Health, a MD from Loyola University, and a PhD in Economics from Harvard University. Alsan trained at Brigham and Women’s Hospital Hiatt Global Health Equity Residency Fellowship – then combined the PhD with an Infectious Disease Fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital. Prior to returning to Harvard she was on faculty at Stanford. She is an applied microeconomist studying health inequality. 

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