Civil Liberties in Times of Crisist

We study people's willingness to trade off civil liberties for increased health security in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic by deploy-ing representative surveys involving around 550,000 responses across 15 countries. We document significant heterogeneity across groups in willingness to sacrifice rights: citizens disadvantaged by income, education, or race are less willing to sacrifice rights than their more advantaged peers in every country. Leveraging naturally occurring variation and experimental approaches, we estimate a one standard deviation increase in health insecurity increases will-ingness to sacrifice civil liberties by 68-83 percent of the difference between the average Chinese and US citizen. (JEL D12, D91, I12, I18, K38, O17,