Back to Business? Business‐Owners and Their Responses to COVID‐19 Policies in a Comparative Perspective

Abstract While necessary to protect human lives, many of the measures implemented by governments to contain the COVID‐19 pandemic imposed significant costs on the population. Drawing on an original representative survey fielded during the first wave of COVID‐19 in April–June 2020 in Sweden and Denmark, we examine how members of different occupational groups evaluated their government's pandemic strategies. Despite sharing several institutional, cultural, and political features, Denmark adopted an extensive lockdown, while Sweden largely relied on individual responsibility. We find that Danish business‐owners, whose incomes were more vulnerable to the economic costs of a strict lockdown, expressed lower trust and satisfaction in the national pandemic strategy and greater concern about the concentration of power by the government, compared to all other Danish occupational categories as well as to business‐owners in Sweden. Our findings thus indicate that exposure to the economic costs of pandemic strategies was not only associated with more critical views towards public health measures, but that it also made citizens more likely to see them as violations to democratic rights.