Sustaining Compliance with COVID-19 Mitigation Measures? Understanding Distancing Behavior in the Netherlands during June 2020

Abstract

In the month of June, the Netherlands had continued its singular trajectory in combating the COVID-19 pandemic. After the transition from the “intelligent lockdown” into the “1.5 meter society,” the month of June heralded further relaxations of the prior mitigation measures. Building on our previous surveys during the month of May, this paper reports the findings of two additional survey waves collected in June (between 8-11 and between 22-26) among nationally representative samples (N = 1041 and N = 1033). The results show that the processes that sustained compliance during the month of May continued to be influential, especially citizens’ intrinsic motivation to comply, their capacity to do so, their impulse control, and social norms that sustained compliance. Furthermore, there were some indications that extrinsic reasons, such as the likelihood of punishment and the fairness of enforcement, may have become more influential in shaping compliance. A comparison to the findings from May revealed, however, that compliance was gradually declining in the Netherlands, as were the resources that sustain it.

Keywords: COVID-19, compliance, social distancing, mitigation, Netherlands

JEL Classification: I12, I18, K32, k42