“I trust you, but I’m scared!” Attitudinal and emotional drivers of support for restrictive interventions during crises

Under what conditions do citizens support restrictive and punitive measures to curb global crises? This article investigates the role of political trust in supporting different interventions across three types of crises—pandemics, climate change, and terrorism—both directly and in conjunction with issue-related anxiety. We test the hypothesis that political trust positively affects the likelihood of accepting restrictive measures during crisis, focusing on Italy as a relevant case study due to its comparatively low levels of political trust. According to affective intelligence theory, we also expect that individual anxiety moderates such a relationship: Political trust should have an effect primarily when people are not anxious. To examine this, we conducted a conjoint experiment administered to a nationally representative sample of 1000 Italian citizens. Respondents were presented with a “crisis vignette” where the nature of the crisis, its severity, and the state measures implemented to curb the threat were randomly allocated as attributes. They were then asked to rate their support for the proposed measure. Results confirm that political trust matters. Citizens with high levels of trust are generally more willing to accept restrictions. However, as predicted, political trust only influences non-anxious voters.