Satisfaction with pandemic management and compliance with public health measures: Evidence from a German household survey on the COVID-19 crisis

PLOS ONE RESEARCH ARTICLE Satisfaction with pandemic management and compliance with public health measures: Evidence from a German household survey on the COVID-19 crisis Philipp Jaschke ID1☯, Sekou Keita ID1☯*, Ehsan Vallizadeh1,2☯, Simon Kühne ID3 1 Institute for Employment Research (IAB), Nuremberg, Germany, 2 University of Bamberg, Bamberg, Germany, 3 Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Jaschke P, Keita S, Vallizadeh E, Kühne S (2023) Satisfaction with pandemic management and compliance with public health measures: Evidence from a German household survey on the COVID-19 crisis. PLoS ONE 18(2): e0281893. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0281893 Editor: Christoph Strumann, Universitatsklinikum Schleswig Holstein Campus Lubeck, GERMANY Received: July 4, 2022 Accepted: February 3, 2023 ☯ These authors contributed equally to this work. * Abstract We study how satisfaction with government efforts to respond to the COVID-19 crisis affects compliance with pandemic mitigation measures. Using a novel longitudinal household survey for Germany, we overcome the identification and endogeneity challenges involved in estimating individual compliance by using an instrumental variable approach that exploits exogenous variation in two indicators measured before the crisis: political party preferences and the mode of information measured by the frequency of using social media and reading newspapers. We find that a one unit increase in subjective satisfaction (on the 0-10 scale) improves protective behavior by 2-4 percentage points. Satisfaction with the government’s COVID-19 management is lower among individuals with right-wing partisan preferences and among individuals who use only social media as an information source. Overall, our results indicate that the effectiveness of uniform policy measures in various domains, such as the health system, social security or taxation, especially during pandemic crises, cannot be fully evaluated without taking individual preferences for collective action into account. Published: February 21, 2023 Copyright: © 2023 Jaschke et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: The dataset used in the study can be requested and obtained from the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW): https://www.diw.de/en/diw_01.c.601584.en/data_ access.html Information on the dataset can be found here: https://www.diw.de/en/diw_01.c. 839040.en/soep-core_data_1984-2020__v37__ available.html. Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work. 1 Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic has claimed the lives of more than 6 million people (as of May, 2022). Governments around the world have implemented a vast number of management strategies and strict public health measures, such as lockdown and social distancing. However, in democratic societies, governments cannot enforce them by means of coercion or by monitoring and controlling the whole society is neither feasible nor desirable [1]. Moreover, the effectiveness, e.g., lower transmission rate of infection, and the efficiency, e.g., lower monitoring and enforcement costs, of these policies depend largely on behavior adaption and on individual commitment and careful preparedness [2–4]. From an economic point of view, a key component of strategic behavior is that individual performance and motivation depend strongly on personal attitudes and subjective well-being preferences and the expected value of a specific PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0281893 February 21, 2023 1 / 21 PLOS ONE Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Pandemic management and compliance with public health measures action. Such attitudes and subjective perceptions are considered to be important in various domains such as in the context of job-satisfaction and occupational commitment [5] and of happiness and tax compliance [6]. From a health policy perspective, uniform health measures that treat all people symmetrically can bear larger social and economic costs compared to targeted measures that differentiate between risk and non-risk groups [4, 7, 8]. This is particularly the case whenever the shortterm costs, e.g., imposing strict lockdowns and social distancing, are perceived more directly than medium- and long-run benefits, e.g., well-functioning healthcare systems. As a consequence, a gap may arise between the individual incentives to comply with public health measures and the socially desired level of compliance. This study addresses the question of whether increased satisfaction with government pandemic management induces more compliance with public health measures, thereby reducing the gap between individual’s perceived costs of compliance and their perceived advantages of compliance for society. Specifically, the cost of public health measures in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic was not equally distributed [9]. Therefore, clear communication and consultation of policy measures would enhance the understanding of policy goals. This could raise satisfaction with government pandemic management and, in turn, increase both individual protective behavior (e.g., wearing face masks or social distancing) and improve health outcomes. Furthermore, understanding the effect of satisfaction with government pandemic management on compliance with health policy measures is highly relevant for a number of reasons. In the context of medical treatment, patients’ degree of satisfaction with healthcare services contributes to their commitment to and compliance with recommended treatments [10, 11]. Moreover, policies induce social action, which entails costs for some individuals to achieve positive outcomes for society. To assess the net effects of policies for society, policymakers need to take into account individual’s preferences, i.e. their perceptions regarding advantages or values associated with the success of the policy [12]. Compelling evidence on the relationship between individual satisfaction with government management and compliance with public health measures in the context of pandemics and health crises is lacking. The aim of this study is therefore to investigate whether and how subjective satisfaction with the government’s pandemic management explains individual compliance with protection and health measures. To this end, we conduct a multivariate regression analysis combining original data collected both before and during the pandemic. 2 Materials and methods The survey used in our study was approved by the ethics committee of Bielefeld University (application number: 2022–040). Statistical analyses were performed with STATA 17.0 (StataCorp LLC, Colleg (...truncated)