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Understanding public attitudes during Covid-19 in France with Polanyi and Gramsci: a political economy of an epidemiological and economic disaster

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Comparative European Politics Aims and scope

Abstract

How ready were governments and the public to sacrifice thousands of lives to avoid economic collapse during the pandemic? We designed a trade-off scale measuring whether the French population is more concerned with the health or economic consequences of the pandemic and administered it eight times from April 2020 to April 2021. We find that concern for the economy was correlated with a preference for the application of a free-market logic, and that it grew swiftly over time and uniformly across the population despite the unprecedented epidemiological circumstances. Absolute differences in concerns correlated with material factors after the first lockdown, and with self-perceived risk of Covid-19 infection and especially political orientation consistently over the year. Respondents who were old, wealthy, highly educated, at low risk of infection, and on the political right were more concerned for the economy than their counterparts. Older respondents’ strong adherence to the free-market logic seems to explain why economic concerns were more important among the group with the highest mortality rate. When political stance is interacted with material factors, marked divisions emerge among the wealthy, the highly educated, and especially the young depending on their political orientation from left to right. We employ insights from Polanyi and Gramsci to interpret these divisions as the potential build-up of a ‘double movement’ around the predominance of the free-market logic in the public’s ‘common sense’.

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Fig. 1
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Source: Coping with Covid-19, Waves 1–8 (Recchi et al. 2021)

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Source: Coping with Covid-19, Waves 1–8 (Recchi et al., 2021)

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Notes

  1. For a measurement of ‘individual free-market mentality’ across different countries, see Czeglédi and Newland, 2018. Liberal countries like the USA top the ranking.

  2. On other trade-offs related to the pandemic such as civil liberties and health risks, see Alsan et al., 2020. On cross-sectional trade-off studies between health and the economy during the pandemic, see Lesschaeve et al., 2021

  3. The number of furloughed workers increased from 1.6 million in October 2020 to 2.9 million in November 2020 (Dares, 2020, 2021).

  4. ISCO is grouped into 9 non-ordinal categories in the following order: legislators, senior officials and managers; professionals; technicians and associate professionals; clerks (routine); service workers, and shop and market sales workers; skilled agricultural and fishery workers; craft and related trade workers; plant and machine operators and assemblers; elementary occupations. The EGP social class scheme contains 5 non-ordinal categories: the salariat; petit bourgeoisie; farmers; skilled workers; non-skilled workers. The Oesch scheme contains 8 non-ordinal categories: large employers and employed professionals; small business owners; technical (semi-) professionals; production workers; (associate) managers; office clerks; sociocultural (semi-) professionals; service workers.

  5. Income and wealth are highly collinear. Hence, we tested our models including either income or wealth, and report the models with wealth here because it is a stronger predictor for concern for health versus the economy. The additional models that include income are available upon request.

  6. We do not consider those who report suspected infection but who do not report a positive test in this category because testing became widely available and free after the first lockdown. Although this means cases are likely to be undercounted in the first waves of our survey, this reflects the global trend of early undercounting due to a lack of available tests.

  7. Moreover, the two concerns on the barometer remained quite balanced over the period. Our barometer had a mean value of 5.22 across all waves; for a full account of descriptive statistics for our covariates, see Table 1.

  8. Available upon request.

  9. We cannot rule out the possibility that some individuals may have worried about the absence of production without adhering to a free-market logic.

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Acknowledgements

We must first thank the entire Coping with Covid-19 (CoCo) research team, including Mirna Safi, Jen Schradie, and Katharina Tittel, along with other collaborating CRIS scholars, notably Olivier Godechot and Philippe Coulangeon. Nicolas Sauger, Emmanuelle Duwez, Mathieu Olivier, and Laureen Rotelli-Bihet at the Centre de données socio-politiques (CDSP) have been indispensable from start to finish in regard to our data. The views expressed herein are those of the authors. The CoCo project was funded by the Flash Covid-19 call by the French Agence nationale de la recherche (ANR), March 2020.

Funding

Funding for this study was received from the Flash Covid-19, L’Agence nationale de la recherche (ANR), March 2020.

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  1. Sciences Po, Centre For Research On Social Inequalities (CRIS), CNRS, 75337, Paris, France

    Emanuele Ferragina, Andrew Zola, Marta Pasqualini & Ettore Recchi

  2. European University Institute (EUI), Florence, Italy

    Ettore Recchi

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Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 3, 4, 5

Table 3 Spearman correlation tests and Pearson Chi-squared tests across all variables.
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Table 4 Variables used to construct each political logic.
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Table 5 Association between material factors and the concern for health/economy over time (omitting subjective and political factors).
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Ferragina, E., Zola, A., Pasqualini, M. et al. Understanding public attitudes during Covid-19 in France with Polanyi and Gramsci: a political economy of an epidemiological and economic disaster. Comp Eur Polit (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41295-023-00369-x

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