Hidden Beneath Aggregated Statistics: Mining Dissent in Nordic COVID-19 Restriction Policies

This blog post is based on an article published in the Journal of International and Comparative Social Policy by Therese Sefton, Johan Nordensvärd, and Therese Dokken.

When crises strike, governments ask people to make sacrifices. During the COVID-19 pandemic, those sacrifices included restrictions on mobility, work, education, and family life. Such measures were difficult for many. But one of the hardest truths about crisis restrictions is that not everyone is asked to sacrifice in the same way.

Consider a single mother living with three children in a small flat in a densely populated area. A lockdown, a home-office mandate, or the closure of schools and kindergartens is likely to affect her very differently from a two-parent family living in a large suburban house. For an older couple without children at home, school closures may be little more than an abstract policy. For a single mother, they may mean trying to combine paid work, childcare, home schooling, and everyday coordination in the same limited space.

This is where our article begins. We look beneath aggregate public opinion in the Nordic countries to ask a simple question: did all groups really “rally around the flag” in the same way?

Using survey data from 5,674 people in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, collected in mid-2022, we examined how reasonable people considered a set of COVID-19 restrictions to be. These included home-office mandates, school closures, kindergarten closures, and restrictions on children’s leisure activities. We then analysed how these perceptions were associated with gender, parenthood, institutional trust, fear of illness, and national context.

More Similar Than Different

The Nordic countries provide a valuable setting for examining these dynamics. They share relatively strong welfare states, high levels of institutional trust, well-developed public sectors, and ambitious gender-equality policies. At the same time, their COVID-19 responses differed considerably.

Norway implemented relatively strict lockdown measures, while Sweden adopted a more relaxed approach. Denmark, Finland, and Iceland fell somewhere in between. We therefore expected differences in policy stringency to produce sharper differences in public perceptions.

Our findings did not strongly support this expectation.

Some country differences did appear. Iceland generally recorded the highest perceived reasonableness, while Finland and Norway showed lower values in some of the models. But overall, the Nordic pattern remained more similar than different.

Policy stringency alone did not strongly structure public support. A stricter national strategy did not necessarily produce either greater acceptance or stronger opposition. Instead, support reflected a combination of institutional trust, fear of illness, and the everyday consequences of specific measures.

Institutional trust and fear of illness were the most consistent factors in the analysis. Respondents with higher trust in government and public institutions were more likely to regard restrictions as reasonable. Trust may have made restrictions seem necessary and proportionate rather than arbitrary or excessive.

Fear of illness was also associated with higher perceived reasonableness. People who were more concerned about becoming ill were more likely to see restrictive measures as justified. Fear increased the perceived need for protection, while trust influenced whether people believed that governments were acting competently and in the public interest.

The Unequal Burdens of Restrictions

Existing research has often shown that women were more likely than men to take the health risks of COVID-19 seriously, support restrictive measures, and comply with public-health guidance. At the same time, women often carried some of the greatest burdens created by those measures.

School and kindergarten closures did not make care work disappear. Instead, they transferred much of it from public institutions into private households. Someone still had to care for children, organise daily routines, and support schooling at home. In many households, women carried a disproportionate share of that additional labour while continuing in paid work.

This creates a more complicated relationship between gender and support for restrictions than a simple women-versus-men comparison suggests. Women may have been more concerned about the disease and more supportive of collective action, while also experiencing the practical consequences of restrictions more severely. These tensions were likely to be especially strong for single parents balancing work and care without another adult in the household.

In our pooled adjusted models, however, the overall differences between women and men were relatively small. This is an important finding in itself. Once other factors were taken into account, women and men did not differ markedly in their general evaluations of COVID-19 restrictions.

But some differences did emerge when gender was considered together with parenthood. Parenthood was associated with somewhat lower perceptions of reasonableness among women, while the corresponding differences among men were minimal. Parents also tended to rate school and kindergarten closures as less reasonable than respondents without children. The differences were generally modest and were not identical across all countries, but they pointed in the same general direction: the everyday consequences of restrictions mattered.

Looking Beneath the Average

Our findings add nuance to the idea of a unified Nordic pandemic response. There was broad support for many restrictions, and the differences between social groups were often modest. But aggregated statistics can conceal important inequalities.

Restrictions are not only judged in terms of their public-health rationale. They are also judged through everyday experience. School closures mean one thing to someone without children and something very different to a parent trying to combine employment, care, and home schooling. A home-office mandate is easier to accept in a large house with a separate study than in an overcrowded flat.

Crisis policies should therefore not be evaluated only in terms of how effective or how strict they are. Governments must also ask how the burdens of restrictions are distributed. Even when measures are necessary, they may deepen existing inequalities unless additional support is provided to those most affected.

The Nordic countries did broadly rally around the flag, but not everyone stood in the same place or paid the same price. Hidden beneath the aggregated statistics was a quieter dissent shaped by parenthood, caregiving, trust, and fear. When responding to a crisis, policymakers can acknowledge these differences. Restrictions are more likely to be regarded as reasonable when institutions are trusted, risks are taken seriously, and the unequal sacrifices demanded from different groups are recognised and addressed. Only then can crisis governance be legitimate.

Reference

Sefton, Therese, Johan Nordensvärd, and Therese Dokken. 2026. “Moving beyond the Nordic Consensus: Discontent and Perceptions of Reasonableness in COVID-19 Restrictions.” Journal of International and Comparative Social Policy: 1–39. doi: 10.1017/ics.2026.10103.

About the Authors

Therese Sefton is a PhD Candidate in Business Administration, Innovation and Governance, Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway.

Johan Nordensvärd is Senior Lecturer in Political Science, Linköping University, Sweden.

Therese Dokken is Researcher at Norwegian Social Research (NOVA), Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway.