Curtailment of Civil Liberties and Subjective Life Satisfaction

Lisa Windsteiger,Kai A Konrad,Michael Ahlheim

doi:10.1007/s10902-021-00491-1

Abstract

This analysis focuses on the lockdown measures in the context of the Covid-19 crisis in Spring 2020 in Germany. In a randomized survey experiment, respondents were asked to evaluate their current life satisfaction after being provided with varying degrees of information about the lethality of Covid-19. We use reactance as a measure of the intensity of a preference for freedom to explain the variation in the observed subjective life satisfaction loss. Our results suggest that it is not high reactance alone that is associated with large losses of life satisfaction due to the curtailment of liberties. The satisfaction loss occurs in particular in combination with receiving information about the (previously overestimated) lethality of Covid-19.

Highlights

How much does personal freedom matter for life satisfaction? In Spring 2020, as a regulatory response to the Covid-19 pandemic, basic freedoms were severely restricted in many countries
Our results suggest that both psychological reactance and receiving information about Covid-19 lethality lead to a higher loss in subjective life satisfaction from the pandemic crisis and the ensuing lockdown measures
Comparing the remembered life satisfaction value with the GSOEP data for Germany for May/June 2019, which is 7.15 (Grimm & Raffelhüschen, 2019), and taking into account that subjective life satisfaction generally tends to be lowest in Winter/January provides an indication that the drop in life satisfaction since January 2020 that we find in our data might even be a conservative proxy for the true loss in happiness people experienced during that time period due to the Corona crisis

Summary

Introduction

In Spring 2020, as a regulatory response to the Covid-19 pandemic, basic freedoms were severely restricted in many countries. These included the right to move freely, freedom of travel, freedom of assembly, rights to engage in one’s own business and the right to meet other people, form groups and engage in social interaction. The policy intervention was triggered by an exogenous event (the pandemic), and provides us with a unique opportunity to assess the direct well-being costs (being agitated, angry, or feeling hampered in one’s freedom of action) and indirect well-being effects (e.g. consequences of restricted economic freedom). We are interested in how individuals’ life satisfaction losses depend on their aversion to rules and restrictions that threaten or eliminate some of their behavioral freedoms, and whether these losses depend on information about Covid-19 lethality (and on how “justified" the restrictions are perceived to be)

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