Who looks up to the Leviathan? Ideology, political trust, and support for restrictive state interventions in times of crisis

The extent in which voters from different ideological viewpoints support state interventions to curb crises
remains an outstanding conundrum, marred by conflicting evidence. In this article, we test two possible
ways out from such puzzle. The role of ideology to explain support for state interventions, we argue, could
be (i) conditional upon the ideological nature of the crisis itself (e.g., whether the crisis relates to
conservation vs. post-materialist values), or (ii) unfolding indirectly, by moderating the role played by
political trust. We present evidence from a conjoint experiment fielded in 2022 on a representative sample
of 1,000 Italian citizens, in which respondents were asked whether they support specific governmental
interventions to curb a crisis, described under different conditions (e.g., type of crisis, severity). Our results
show that the type of crisis matters marginally – right-wing respondents were more likely to support state
interventions only in the case of terrorism. More fundamentally, political trust affects the probability to
support state interventions, but only for right-wing citizens.