OB Research Seminar - Akshay Moorthy, HEC Lausanne

Paternalistic policies lie at the heart of the citizen-state relationship, but our understanding of people's support for different types of paternalistic policies is limited. We study people's preferences for soft and hard paternalism through a large-scale, between-subjects survey experiment conducted on nationally representative samples from 58 countries and 60,000 participants. Globally, people prefer soft paternalism to hard paternalism. We document striking variation both across and within countries: Paternalistic preferences vary systematically by economic development and across demographic characteristics such as age, education, and religiosity. Economic security and democratic capital are associated with a larger difference between preferences for soft and hard paternalism. Our preference measure predicts support for specific paternalistic policies. We introduce a conceptual framework to organise these findings.