The role of party preferences in explaining acceptance of freedom restrictions in a pandemic context: the Italian case

Abstract

As a consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic, several governments adopted disease containment measures limiting individual freedom, especially freedom of movement. Our contribution aims at studying the role played by party preferences in explaining attitudes towards those freedom limitations during the pandemic, taking into account the moderating role played by confidence in institutions and collectivist-individualistic orientations. Focussing on Italy, as the first western democracy to be hit by Covid-19 and to adopt harsh restrictive measures, we analyse data coming from the ResPOnsE COVID-19 project. Our study initially investigates whether attitudes towards freedom restrictions are associated with the dynamics of the pandemic and the institutional responses to it. Then, through multilevel regression models, we test several hypotheses about the relationship between party preferences, confidence in institutions, collectivistic orientations and public acceptance of Covid-19 containment measures limiting individual freedom. Findings show that party preferences are associated with different attitudes towards freedom restrictions to contain the pandemic, but this occurs only if people have individualistic orientations. Collectivistic orientations and confidence in institutions are positively associated with acceptance of freedom restrictions, regardless of party preferences. As regards the latter, neither a classical ideological explanation (conservative people more inclined to accept limitations to personal freedoms) nor a government-opposition explanation (supporters of government parties more inclined to accept freedom restrictions) seems to be adequate to fully account for the mechanisms behind acceptance of Covid-19 harsh containment measures. Thus, we offer an alternative ideological explanation by pointing out the ambiguous nature of contemporary right-wing populisms.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11135-022-01436-3.

Keywords: Attitudes towards freedom restrictions; Collectivism; Covid-19; Institutional trust; Party preferences; Survey research.

Fig. 1

LOWESS estimations (bandwidth = 0.6) of daily means of willingness to accept freedom limitations (n = 14,260) and daily frequency of Covid-19 deaths. ResPOnsE COVID-19 wave-1 data, April 9–July 4, 2020

Fig. 2

Predicted averages of attitudes towards freedom restrictions by party preferences and trust in parliament, estimated by Model 3 in Table A2 in the Online Appendix. ResPOnsE COVID-19 wave-1 data, 95% confidence intervals

Fig. 3

Predicted averages of attitudes towards freedom restrictions by party preferences and collectivistic orientations, estimated by Model 4 in Table A2 in the Online Appendix. ResPOnsE COVID-19 wave-1 data, 95% confidence intervals

Fig. 4

Predicted averages of individual variation in attitudes towards freedom limitations between panel wave-2 and wave-1 by party preferences, estimated by multilevel model shown in Table 2 (n = 2,398)