Moral Obligation, Public Leadership, and Collective Action for Epidemic Prevention and Control: Evidence from the Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Emergency

To investigate the effect of villagers’ moral obligation and village cadres’ public leadership on villagers’ collective action for epidemic prevention and control, against the background of the corona virus disease 2019 (COVID-19) emergency in China, we constructed models based on the institutional analysis and development (IAD) framework and employed principal component analysis (PCA) and ordered probit regression, drawing on survey data from 533 villagers in Henan province adjacent to the COVID-19 origin province, Hubei, China. The results indicate that: (1) generally, both moral obligation and public leadership as well as their constituent indicators contributed positively to collective action for COVID-19 prevention and control; (2) moreover, moral obligation and public leadership can strengthen each other’s positive role in collective action for COVID-19 prevention and control. Based on the above findings, this paper suggests that villagers’ moral obligation can be perfected through internalizing epidemic prevention and control norms into the villagers’ moral norms by the way of villagers mastering the rural public health governance scheme. In addition, public leadership can be improved through professional training of village cadres and by motivating village elites to run for village cadres. With improved villagers’ moral obligation and village cadres’ public leadership, collective action for epidemic prevention and control could be more likely to be realized.