Concerns have recently been raised about the potential demise of democracy – although there was a perceived slide in the strength of democratic institutions even before the pandemic – this was possibly accelerated by restrictions on movement and other public health regulations. Using in-depth survey experiments of 8,000 responses from several Western democracies, we find that, following the treatment providing information on restrictions and infringements by China and South Korea to contain the COVID-19 pandemic, subjects become less willing to sacrifice specific and generic rights and more worried about long-term erosion relative to the control group, but there was no effect of our treatment on support for democratic procedures. Taken together, the results suggest that support for democratic processes was inelastic to concerns about the freedoms it enabled very early in the pandemic and might have been a moment of particular vulnerability.
