Fear, soft propaganda, and the demand for government intervention: Quasi-experimental evidence from Russia

We investigate the effect of fear on public demand for state intervention. Our identification strategy leverages a unique quasi-experiment in Russia, where an episode of a popular health-related TV show aired misinformation on virus-fatality risks during our survey on pandemic behavior. Isolating the exogenous variation in fear of infection with a shift-share instrument based on the unanticipated timing of this episode and pre-Covid spatial variation in the show’s popularity, we find that fear substantially increases demand for regulation, governmental healthcare spending, and unemployment support while leaving policies unrelated to Covid, like censorship or housing, unaffected. Mechanism analysis reveals that fear enhances perceptions of others’ noncompliance, consistent with theories of regulation that highlight free-riding concerns.