When and Why do People Accept Nudges and other Public Policy Interventions to counter COVID-19 Transmission?

The successful introduction of public policy interventions to prompt behaviour change depends heavily on whether citizens endorse the policy. We developed a concise review-based framework for the acceptance of nudges and other public policies to offer a better overview of the relevant determinants and their interactions. The model is easy to communicate and expandable for further research. The objective of this paper is to test the proposed framework and important intercorrelations for the context of COVID-19. Data is obtained from the COVID-19 Snapshot Monitoring project (COSMO). Literature indicates that higher problem awareness of COVID-19 predicts greater public policy acceptance countering COVID-19. We suppose this relationship to be mediated by citizens’ desire for political intervention. Moreover, greater policy acceptance is assumed to predict greater policy compliance. We assume the path between problem awareness and the desire for political intervention to be moderated by agent-specific characteristics, and the path between the desire for political intervention and policy acceptance to be moderated by policy-specific qualities. Understanding when and why people do support governmental decisions during pandemics is helpful for further research on public policy acceptance and the successful implementation of public policies promoting health-protective behavior.