Government policies, national culture and social distancing during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic: International evidence

• Published in: Safety science Vol. 135; p. 105138
• Main Author: Wang, Yan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Netherlands Elsevier Ltd 01-03-2021; Elsevier BV
• Subjects: American culture; COVID-19; Cultural factors; Culture; Disease control; Government stringency; Pandemics; Policies; Public policy; Social distancing; COVID-19; Government stringency; Social distancing; Culture
• ISSN: 0925-7535; 1879-1042; 0925-7535
• DOI: 10.1016/j.ssci.2020.105138

•This paper is the first to compare the impacts of government policies and national culture on social distancing.•This paper is the first to investigate the relationship between social distancing and all six of Hofstede’s national culture dimensions.•This paper focus on the first wave of the COVID-19 outbreak since it isolates the impact of culture and government policies better than in the second wave.
We assess the impact of national culture and government policies on social distancing to fight COVID-19 across major economies during the first wave of the pandemic. To do so, we regress government stringency index from Oxford COVID-19 government response tracker together with Hofstede’s national culture scores on social distancing data from Google mobility reports. We find that government stringency has a far larger impact on social distancing than national culture. Social distancing increases with government stringency. We find two cultural dimensions matter: social distancing decreases with ‘Long-term Orientation’; the opposite is true for ‘Indulgence’. Our results convey that policymakers must act decisively rather than blaming the culture.