All in this together: deservingness of government aid during the COVID-19 pandemic

Executive Summary

The COVID-19 pandemic placed unprecedented pressure on governments to engage in widespread cash transfers directly to citizens to help mitigate economic losses. Using experimental evidence, this study evaluates whether considerations related to deservingness, similarity, and prejudicial attitudes structure public support for these transfers. A preregistered conjoint experiment with 2,522 Canadians found broad, generous, and nondiscriminatory support for direct COVID-19 cash transfers, with a grand mean suggested allocation of 1,588 dollars. Contrary to expectations, no significant racial penalty was detected, though non-citizens received somewhat less than citizens.

A second study, accepted as a preregistered report, compared COVID-19-related outlays with a nonemergency cash transfer (the GST rebate) and found that COVID-19-related spending was more universal. Where allocations did differ, they did so in relatively uncontroversial ways, such as giving more to those who are ill, who have children, or who have lower incomes; neither objective nor subjective similarity between respondents and hypothetical recipients affected allocations in either study. Deservingness criteria such as health status, children, citizenship, employment status, and income mattered more for the GST rebate than for pandemic-related aid, and the tendency to allocate more to lower-income profiles relative to wealthy ones was considerably stronger under the GST condition.

The authors conclude that during a society-level crisis such as COVID-19, normal deservingness-based patterns are laid aside in favor of a more universal and collectivist set of preferences, giving governments considerable scope to adopt large-scale, universal cash transfers with little risk of public backlash, even though this universalism produces a redistributive schema that is net less progressive.