Did the different public-health policies that Sweden and Denmark pursued in the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic result in different levels of public trust in governments' and health authorities' ability to guide the two countries safely through the pandemic? How did the level of trust change as the pandemic unfolded? And were there any cross-country differences in the correlates of trust? Using three original representative surveys conducted in Sweden and Denmark between late March and late June, 2020, this article answers these questions. It finds that Danes consistently trusted their government and health authorities more than the Swedes did. While Swedish trust was politicized and shaped by ideology from the onset of the pandemic, this only later became the case in Denmark. The findings provide insights into popular evaluations of different public-health policies in two otherwise similar countries, with implications for future policy making.Sweden and Denmark adopted markedly different public-health policies during the COVID-19 pandemic. Whereas Sweden became famous, perhaps infamous, for its liberal approach, which relied heavily on principles of voluntarism and personal responsibility, Denmark opted for more stringent policies, closing its borders early on and shutting all its schools in the middle of March 2020. We ask how these policies influenced public trust in the ability of the Swedish and Danish governments and public-health authorities to guide the two countries safely through the pandemic. 1 In a global perspective, Sweden and Denmark are socially and institutionally similar countries, but they made very different choices when the new coronavirus spread across Europe in early 2020. This allows us to investigate whether differences in public-health policies mattered for how citizens felt about their political leaders and their public-health authorities.

Attitudes towards EU integration are widely studied, yet we know only little about the role of personality for EU attitudes. Utilizing a framing experiment encompassing positive and negative frames of EU integration, this article reports on how personality influences attitudes towards EU integration, and how personal predispositions moderate framing effects, impacting EU attitude formation. The study relies on Danish and Swedish data (N = 1808). I test both the direct impact of personality on EU attitudes and personality's moderating impact on framing effects. I find that extraversion and openness positively correlate with positive EU attitudes, while people scoring high on neuroticism tend to support the EU less. Furthermore, I find that personality moderates different EU frames. Individuals with certain personality traits are more influenced by framing effects than others, while positive and negative frames also are perceived differently according to personal predispositions. I find only little country differences between Denmark and Sweden.

Personality's direct effects on various aspects of political attitudes and behavior have received substantial attention, yet few investigate its indirect effects-even though several studies posit that these may be even more important. We utilize original survey data from five European countries (Denmark, Germany, Poland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom) to provide a comprehensive, cross-national test of the extent to which personal predispositions have a direct versus indirect impact on public support for the European Union (EU). Knowing that ideology is an important determinant of views towards European integration, we look specifically at the extent to which ideological self-placement mediates the effect of the Big Five personality traits on EU attitudes. We indeed find evidence of significant mediation-most robustly for the traits of openness, conscientiousness, and emotional stability-particularly in contexts where party-system complexity is low. These results reiterate that personality matters-both directly and indirectly-for political attitudes and behavior, confirm that ideology is an important mechanism transferring personality effects forward, and suggest that scholars would do well to further evaluate alternative pathways through which personality's effects travel.

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