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-19, 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.