Policy Compliance Under Disagreement: The Joint Roles of Duty/Deterrence Beliefs, Symbolic Ideology, and Policy Environment

This study examines how citizens comply with government mandates when public disagreement with policy measures is high. Drawing on survey data from South Korea and the United States during the COVID‐19 pandemic, we test how two distinct belief systems—duty‐based and deterrence‐based—relate to compliance under disagreement, and how these relationships are conditioned by symbolic ideology and national policy environments. Results show that duty‐based beliefs reduce, while deterrence‐based beliefs increase, the degree of unwilling compliance. Symbolic ideology amplifies the effects of both beliefs, strengthening the negative association for duty and the positive association for deterrence. This amplification is more pronounced in the decentralized, low‐trust, individualistic U.S. context than in the centralized, high‐trust, collectivistic Korean context. These findings advance compliance research by theorizing “compliance under disagreement” as distinct from ordinary compliance, and by integrating motivational, identity, and contextual perspectives. They also underscore that identical coercive rules can evoke divergent compliance pathways across governance regimes, depending on how motivational beliefs and ideological cueing are embedded in policy environments.