Replication Data for: Crisis Management and Territorial Preferences: Experimental Evidence from the Pandemic

Centralization represents the historical response of political elites to overcome the difficulties of coordination when faced with an external threat. Yet we know little on the demand-side of authority distribution in the context of a crisis. In this paper, we develop a theoretical model on the effect of crises and coordination inefficiencies on the territorial preferences of individuals. We predict that crisis-time uncoordinated responses will prompt a centralizing shift in preferences. We tested this argument using online survey experiments in a comparative sample of 13 countries in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The results show that exposure to unsuccessful intergovernmental coordination shifted individual preferences toward a more centralized power allocation in a majority of countries. This effect is moderated by contextual conditions, such as actual multilevel policy efforts and changes in the intensity of the pandemic. Individual-level territorial identity or partisan identification also intervene as significant moderators of our treatment. Materials necessary to replicate the figures, tables and supplementary materials of the article.