Conditional Persistence? Historical Disease Exposure and Government Response to COVID-19

Drawing on the literature on cultural adaptations to historical disease exposure, we investigate differences in government containment policies to the COVID-19 pandemic. We hypothesize that a higher historical exposure to disease led to a stricter government response, particularly during the first year of the pandemic characterized by fundamental uncertainty. Our empirical analysis confirms this hypothesis, both for differences in government responses to disease dynamics between countries and for state-level containment policies within the United States. Our results suggest that a persistent effect of historical health legacies on contemporary outcomes, may be conditional on the character of the public health risk at hand. Deep cultural norms, determined by historical experiences, may play a minor role most of the time but are activated in times of fundamental uncertainty.