Citizens’ Trade-offs between Life, Liberty, and Money during a Public Health Crisis : A Comparative Replication in Shanghai, Singapore, and Taipei

Since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, governments worldwide have adopted a wide range of lockdown measures to curb the spread of COVID-19. While lockdowns are viewed as the most efficient intervention to help people muddle through this public health crisis, they also bring hefty social and economic consequences for community members, such as financial hardship and an infringement of liberty. Thus, the COVID-19 pandemic offers an unprecedented setting for studying citizens' relative importance to human and economic losses while factoring in the length of lockdown restrictions. Our study seizes this opportunity to disentangle the trade-offs faced by individuals during a health emergency: life, liberty, and income loss. We aim to investigate the question that Belle and Cantarelli (2021) raised, “What is the relative importance that citizens place on human life, income, and freedom when forming their preferences regarding the lockdown measures that governments take to address a public health crisis?” To replicate Belle and Cantarelli’s (2021) study in Italy, we select different settings in Asia with other institutional and government forms, namely Shanghai, Singapore, and Taipei. We expect that the replication with extensions will push the boundaries of Belle and Cantarelli’s original study to different contexts.

In this work, we conduct a three-wave replication in three metropolitans with 1000 subjects for each setting. Respondents are asked to choose between four situations that differ along the following attributes: deaths avoided, length of lockdown, and income loss. With a cyclical fold-over approach, we arrange the 27 choice sets by pairing each unique situation with its mirror image, obtained by moving each attribute to its next level. Based on the DCE approach, we use latent class analysis (LCA) to explore further the antecedents of trade-offs between life, liberty, and income loss and whether different institutional, political, and cultural factors account for these choices.

This research is a first attempt to test the boundary conditions of Belle and Cantarelli’s findings. Replicating in comparative contexts provides a broader test of the generalizability of the original conclusions (Boyne et al., 2009). Many scholars develop a theory of context in public administration (e.g., Meier, Rutherford, and Avellaneda 2017; O’Toole and Meier 2015), which suggests that context matters. What holds in the western context may not work in the eastern context, and vice versa. We expect to provide theoretical and empirical contributions to public crisis management scholarship and research on human values and moral dilemmas.