How does fear affect public demand for state intervention? Timothy M. Frye (Marshall D. Shulman Professor of Post-Soviet Foreign Policy) explores this question with coauthors Ekaterina Borisova, Koen Schoors, Vladimir Zabolotsky and Nikita Zakharov in “Fear, Soft propaganda, and the Demand for Government Intervention: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Russia.” (“European Economic Review,” Volume 186, June 2026, 105324).

Abstract: “We investigate the effect of fear on public demand for state intervention. Our identification strategy leverages a unique quasi-experiment in Russia, where an episode of a popular health-related TV show aired misinformation on virus-fatality risks during our survey on pandemic behavior. Isolating the exogenous variation in fear of infection with a shift-share instrument based on the unanticipated timing of this episode and pre-Covid spatial variation in the show’s popularity, we find that fear substantially increases demand for regulation, governmental healthcare spending, and unemployment support while leaving policies unrelated to Covid-19, like censorship or housing, unaffected. Mechanism analysis reveals that fear enhances perceptions of others’ noncompliance, consistent with theories of regulation that highlight free-riding concerns.”