The health and economic outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic will in part be determined by how effectively experts can communicate information to the public and the degree to which people follow expert recommendation. Using a survey experiment conducted in May of 2020 with almost 5,000 respondents, this paper examines the effect of source cues and message frames on perceptions of information credibility in the context of COVID-19. Each health recommendation was framed by expert or non-expert sources, was fact- or experience-based, and suggested potential gain or loss to test if either the source cue or framing of issues affected responses to the pandemic. We find no evidence that either source cue or message framing influence people’s responses—instead, respondents’ ideological predispositions, media consumption, and age explain much of the variation in survey responses, suggesting that public health messaging may face challenges from growing ideological cleavages in American politics.

Studies of judicial legitimacy have largely focused on courts in the United States. We lack a cross-national measure of judicial legitimacy and little is known about the sources of legitimacy of court systems in different countries. In this paper, I combine cross-national surveys, expert data and government statistics, to build a new cross-national measure of judicial legitimacy for over 120 countries from 1990 till 2020. Drawing on this new measure, I test whether the constitutional structure of the legal system can affect the future legitimacy of courts. I find no evidence that courts in countries that have constitutional provisions such as guarantees of judicial independence and fair trial are more likely to be perceived as legitimate by the public. Instead, I find that variation in judicial legitimacy can be explained by the levels of democracy, gross domestic product and de-facto independence of courts.

In this article, we examine the role of intermediaries in sustaining political clientelism in rural Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh. Drawing from fieldwork and electoral data, we show that clientelism in Saharanpur is based around providing three specific guarantees to the voter—security from or by the police, facilitation in the tehsil and mediation in cases that would otherwise go to court—which we collectively refer to as guardianship. We explain how guardianship, more than most other forms of clientelistic exchange, requires intermediaries. In the case of Saharanpur, these intermediaries are usually individuals occupying formal positions of power within various circles of Panchayati Raj Institutions. Finally, we argue that it is the concentric nature of constituencies provided by the decentralized political structure which is ultimately responsible for the sustenance of intermediary networks as well as the perpetuation of clientelism in rural Saharanpur.

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