Living and perceiving a crisis: how the pandemic influenced Americans' preferences and beliefs

107 Pages Posted: 2 Mar 2022

See all articles by Guglielmo Briscese

Guglielmo Briscese

University of Chicago

Maddalena Grignani

Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Stephen Stapleton

University of Chicago

Date Written: March 1, 2022

Abstract

Crises can cause important societal changes by shifting citizens' preferences and beliefs, but how such change happens remains an open question. Following a representative sample of Americans in a longitudinal multi-wave survey throughout 2020, we find that citizens reduced trust in public institutions and became more supportive of government spending after being directly impacted by the crisis, such as when they lost a sizeable portion of their income or knew someone hospitalized with the virus. These shifts occurred very rapidly, sometimes in a matter of weeks, and persisted over time. We also record an increase in the partisan gap on the same outcomes, which can be largely explained by misperceptions about the crisis inflated by the consumption of partisan leaning news. In an experiment, we expose respondents to the same source of information and find that it successfully recalibrates perceptions, with persistent effects. We complement our analysis by employing machine learning to estimate heterogeneous treatment effects, and show that our findings are robust to several specifications and estimation strategies. In sum, both lived experiences and media inflated misperceptions can alter citizens' beliefs rapidly during a crisis.

Keywords: E60, P16, Z13

JEL Classification: Crisis, polarization, welfare policies support

Suggested Citation

Briscese, Guglielmo and Grignani, Maddalena and Stapleton, Stephen, Living and perceiving a crisis: how the pandemic influenced Americans' preferences and beliefs (March 1, 2022). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4047217 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4047217

Guglielmo Briscese (Contact Author)

University of Chicago ( email )

1101 East 58th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
United States

Maddalena Grignani

Universitat Pompeu Fabra ( email )

Ramon Trias Fargas, 25-27
Barcelona, E-08005
Spain

Stephen Stapleton

University of Chicago ( email )

IL
United States

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