Becher, Michael

Person:
Becher, Michael

First Name

Michael

Last Name

Becher

Affiliation

IE University

School

IE School of Politics, Economics & Global Affairs

Department

International Relations

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 10

From Anti-vax Intentions to Vaccination: Panel and Experimental Evidence from Nine Countries
(2022-02) Galasso, Vincenzo; Pons, Vincent; Profeta, Paola; Becher, Michael; Brouard, Sylvain; Foucault, Martial; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75
Millions of people refuse COVID-19 vaccination. Using original data from two surveys in nine OECD countries, we analyze the determinants of anti-vax intentions in December 2020 and show that half of the anti-vax individuals were vaccinated by summer 2021. Vaccinations were more likely among individuals aged 50+, exposed to COVID-19, compliant with public restrictions, more informed on traditional media, trusting scientists, and less concerned about vaccines’ side effects. We run a survey experiment with informational messages. In EU countries, a message about protecting health largely increases vaccinations, even among anti-vax individuals. In the U.K. and U.S., a message about protecting the economy generates similar effects. Our findings suggest that informational campaigns should adopt adequate narratives and address concerns about vaccines’ side effects.
Comparative Experimental Evidence on Compliance with Social Distancing During the Covid-19 Pandemic
(SSRN, 2020-07-04) Becher, Michael; Stegmueller, Daniel; Brouard, Sylvain; Kerrouche, Eric; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75
Social distancing is a central public health measure in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, but individuals’ compliance cannot be taken for granted. We use a survey experiment to examine the prevalence of non-compliance with social distancing in nine countries and test pre-registered hypotheses about individual-level characteristics associated with less social distancing. Leveraging a list experiment to control for social desirability bias, we find large cross-national variation in adherence to social distancing guidelines. Compliance varies systematically with COVID-19 fatalities and the strictness of lockdown measures. We also find substantial heterogeneity in the role of individual-level predictors. While there is an ideological gap in social distancing in the US and New Zealand, this is not the case in European countries. Taken together, our results suggest caution when trying to model pandemic health policies on other countries’ experiences. Behavioral interventions targeted towards specific demographics that work in one context might fail in another.
Sociodemographic and Psychological Correlates of Compliance with the COVID-19 Public Health Measures in France
(Cambridge University Press, 2020-04-23) Brouard, Sylvain; Vasilopoulos, Pavlos; Becher, Michael; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75
The COVID-19 disease was first identified in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, having since spread rapidly across the world. The infection and mortality rates of the disease have forced governments to implement a wave of public health measures. Depending on the context, these range from the implementation of simple hygienic rules to measures such as social distancing or lockdowns that cause major disruptions in citizens’ daily lives. The success of these crucial public health measures rests on the public's willingness to comply. However, individual differences in following the official public health recommendations for stopping the spread of COVID-19 have not yet to our knowledge been assessed. This study aims to fill this gap by assessing the sociodemographic and psychological correlates of implementing public health recommendations that aim to halt the COVID-19 pandemic. We investigate these associations in the context of France, one of the countries that has been most severely affected by the pandemic, and which ended up under a nationwide lockdown on March 17. In the next sections we describe our theoretical expectations over the associations between sociodemographics, personality, ideology, and emotions with abiding by the COVID-19 public health measures. We then test these hypotheses using data from the French Election Study.
Endogenous Benchmarking and Government Accountability: Experimental Evidence from the COVID-19 Pandemic
(Cambridge University Press, 2024) Becher, Michael; Brouard, Sylvain; Stegmueller, Daniel; Becher, Michael; Duke University; College of Natural Resources and Sciences; Humboldt State University; Agence Nationale de la Recherche; National Research Foundation of Korea; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75
When do cross-national comparisons enable citizens to hold governments accountable? According to recent work in comparative politics,benchmarking across borders is a powerful mechanism for making elections work. However,little attention has been paid to the choice of benchmarks and how they shape democratic accountability. We extend existing theories to account for endogenous benchmarking. Using the COVID-19 pandemic as a test case,we embedded experiments capturing self-selection and exogenous exposure to benchmark information from representative surveys in France,Germany,and the UK. The experiments reveal that when individuals have the choice,they are likely to seek out congruent information in line with their prior view of the government. Moreover,going beyond existing experiments on motivated reasoning and biased information choice,endogenous benchmarking occurs in all three countries despite the absence of partisan labels. Altogether,our results suggest that endogenous benchmarking weakens the democratic benefits of comparisons across borders. © 2024 Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.
Addressing vaccine hesitancy: experimental evidence from nine high-income countries during the COVID-19 pandemic
(BMJ Journals, 2023-09-22) Galasso, Vincenzo; Pons, Vincent; Profeta, Paola; McKee, Martin; Stuckler, David; Becher, Michael; Brouard, Sylvain; Foucault, Martial; French National Research Agency ; French region Nouvelle Aquitaine; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75
We study the impact of public health messages on intentions to vaccinate and vaccination uptakes, especially among hesitant groups. We performed an experiment comparing the effects of egoistic and altruistic messages on COVID-19 vaccine intentions and behaviour. We administered different messages at random in a survey of 6379 adults in December 2020, following up with participants in the nationally representative survey Citizens' Attitudes Under COVID-19 Project covering nine high-income countries (Australia, Austria, France, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, Sweden, the UK and the USA). Four alternative interventions were tested, based on narratives of (1) self-protection, (2) protecting others, (3) reducing health risks and (4) economic protection. We measure vaccination intentions in the December 2020 survey and elicit actual vaccination behaviour by respondents in the June/July 2021 survey. Messages conveying self-protection had no effect on vaccine intentions but altruistic messages, emphasising protecting other individuals (0.022, 95% CI -0.004 to 0.048), population health (0.030, 95% CI 0.003 to 0.056) and the economy (0.038, 95% CI 0.013 to 0.064) had substantially stronger effects. These effects were stronger in countries experiencing high COVID-19 mortality (Austria, France, Italy, Sweden, the UK and the USA), where health risks may have been more salient, but weaker and, in several cases, not significant where mortality was low (Australia, Germany and New Zealand). On follow-up at 6 months, these brief communication interventions corresponded to substantially higher vaccination uptake. Our experiments found that commonly employed narratives around self-protection had no effect. However, altruistic messages about protecting individuals, population health and the economy had substantially positive and enduring effects on increasing vaccination intentions. Our results can help structure communication campaigns during pandemics and are likely to generalise to other vaccine-preventable epidemics.
Gender differences in COVID-19 attitudes and behavior: Panel evidence from eight countries
(National Academy of Sciences, 2020-11-03) Galasso, Vincenzo; Pons, Vincent ; Profeta, Paola; Becher, Michael; Brouard, Sylvain; Foucault, Martial ; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75
The initial public health response to the breakout of COVID-19 required fundamental changes in individual behavior, such as isolation at home or wearing masks. The effectiveness of these policies hinges on generalized public obedience. Yet, people's level of compliance may depend on their beliefs regarding the pandemic. We use original data from two waves of a survey conducted in March and April 2020 in eight Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries (n = 21,649) to study gender differences in COVID-19-related beliefs and behaviors. We show that women are more likely to perceive COVID-19 as a very serious health problem, to agree with restraining public policy measures, and to comply with them. Gender differences in attitudes and behavior are sizable in all countries. They are accounted for neither by sociodemographic and employment characteristics nor by psychological and behavioral factors. They are only partially mitigated for individuals who cohabit or have direct exposure to the virus. We show that our results are not due to differential social desirability bias. This evidence has important implications for public health policies and communication on COVID-19, which may need to be gender based, and it unveils a domain of gender differences: behavioral changes in response to a new risk.
‘Citizens’ Attitudes Under Covid19’ a cross-country panel survey of public opinion in 11 advanced democracies
(Nature Research, 2022) Brouard, Sylvain; Foucault, Martial; Michel, Elie; Becher, Michael; Vasilopoulos, Pavlos; Bono, Pierre Henri; Sormani, Nicolas; Becher, Michael; World Bank Group; Harvard Business School; McGill University; National Bureau of Economic Research; University of Edinburgh; Agence Nationale de la Recherche; European University Institute; Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique; Bocconi University; Agence Française de Développement; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75
This article introduces data collected in the Citizens’ Attitudes Under Covid-19 Project (CAUCP),which surveyed public opinion throughout the Covid-19 pandemic in 11 democracies between March and December 2020. In this paper,we present a unique cross-country panel survey of citizens’ attitudes and behaviors during a worldwide unprecedented health,governance,and economic crisis. This dataset investigates the behavioral and attitudinal consequences of multifaceted Covid19 crisis across time and contexts. In this paper,we describe the design of the CAUCP and the descriptive features of the dataset; we also present promising research prospects. © 2022,The Author(s).
Ideology and compliance with health guidelines during the COVID-19 pandemic: A comparative perspective
(Wiley, 2021-08-30) Becher, Michael; Stegmueller, Daniel; Brouard, Sylvain; Kerrouche, Eric; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75
Objective We measure the prevalence of noncompliance with public health guidelines in the COVID-19 pandemic and examine how it is shaped by political ideology across countries. Methods A list experiment of noncompliance and a multi-item scale of health-related behaviors were embedded in a comparative survey of 11,000 respondents in nine OCED countries. We conduct a statistical analysis of the list experiment capturing degrees of noncompliance with social distancing rules and estimate ideological effect heterogeneity. A semiparametric analysis examines the functional form of the relationship between ideology and the propensity to violate public health guidelines. Results Our analyses reveal substantial heterogeneity between countries. Ideology plays an outsized role in the United States. No association of comparable magnitude is found in the majority of the other countries in our study. In many settings, the impact of ideology on health-related behaviors is nonlinear. Conclusion Our results highlight the importance of taking a comparative perspective. Extrapolating the role of ideology from the United States to other advanced industrialized societies might paint an erroneous picture of the scope of possible nonpharmaceutical interventions. Heterogeneity limits the extent to which policymakers can learn from experiences across borders.
Prime ministers and the electoral cost of using the confidence vote in legislative bargaining: evidence from France
(Taylor & Francis, 2016-06-23) Becher, Michael; Brouard, Sylvain; Guinaudeau, Isabelle; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75
Do prime ministers pay an electoral penalty for using procedural force to pass laws? Influential theories of parliamentary governance and legislative bargaining assume that the use of the confidence vote procedure – parliamentary governments’ most powerful legislative weapon – entails an electoral cost, but evidence on this important claim has been scarce. This article provides the first estimates of how prime ministers’ public approval responds to their use of the confidence vote. Analysing time series data from France 1979–2008, it is found that prime ministers experience a considerable drop in approval after their use of the confidence vote that is not accounted for by standard economic and political covariates. The effect size is similar to a 1 per cent decline in economic growth. The findings help explain French prime ministers’ selective use of the confidence vote procedure. They also suggest that political costs constrain the bargaining power conferred by the confidence vote.
Executive Accountability Beyond Outcomes: Experimental Evidence on Public Evaluations of Powerful Prime Ministers
(Wiley, 2020-09-08) Becher, Michael; Brouard, Sylvain; French National Research Agency; Nouvelle Aquitaine; University Toulouse; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75
For valuable comments and discussions, we are grateful to Christian Breunig, Martial Foucault, Victor Gay, Carlo Horz, Patrick Le Bihan, Nolan McCarty, Saurabh Pant, Daniel Pemstein, Leah Rosenzweig, Petra Schleiter, Karine Van Der Straeten, Yannis Vassiliadis, Christopher Wlezien, Christina Zuber as well as conference/seminar participants at APSA (2017), EPSA (2018), IAST/TSE, Sciences Po Paris, the University of Konstanz and the University of Oxford, as well as the anonymous reviewers. This work was supported by a public grant overseen by the French National Research Agency (ANR) as part of the “Investissements d'Avenir” program within the framework of the LIEPP center of excellence (ANR11LABX0091, ANR 11 IDEX000502). Financial support from the region Nouvelle Aquitaine (DEMOREG project) is also gratefully acknowledged. Becher gratefully acknowledges IAST funding from the ANR under the Investments for the Future (“Investissements d'Avenir”) program, grant ANR-17-EURE-0010, and from the IDEX-Emergence program at University Toulouse 1 Capitole.