Romanians' willingness to comply with restrictive measures during the COVID-19 pandemic: evidence from an online survey

The COVID-19 pandemic has shaken many countries worldwide and forced them to take unprecedented public health restrictive measures to stop the spread of coronavirus infections. For any disease containment strategy to be successful, public willingness to comply with the restrictive measures is essential. In this paper, we report findings from a national online survey on the public perception of the COVID-19 pandemic in Romania. We show that individual compliance with restrictive measures is shaped by factors such as news consumption, trust in institutions, feelings of uncertainty, and belief in conspiracy theories surrounding the outbreak, in addition to demographic factors. We found that news consumption, information received on social networking sites and instant messaging platforms, trust in official sites, as well as education and gender could be the strongest predictors of Romanians' willingness to comply. Furthermore, belief in conspiracies related to the coronavirus outbreak positively influences Romanians' compliance with restrictive measures.