Pandemic politics: policy evaluations of government responses to COVID-19

Abstract

The COVID-19 crisis has demanded that governments take restrictive measures that are abnormal for most representative democracies. This article aims to examine the determinants of the public's evaluations towards those measures. This article focuses on political trust and partisanship as potential explanatory factors of evaluations of each government's health and economic measures to address the COVID-19 crisis. To study these relationships between trust, partisanship and evaluation of measures, data from a novel comparative panel survey is utilised, comprising eleven democracies and three waves, conducted in spring 2020. This article provides evidence that differences in evaluations of the public health and economic measures between countries also depend on contextual factors, such as polarisation and the timing of the measures' introduction by each government. Results show that the public's approval of the measures depends strongly on their trust in the national leaders, an effect augmented for voters of the opposition. KEYWORDS COVID-19; political trust; partisanship; coronavirus crisis; polarisationThe policy responses in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic that swept the globe from late 2019 onwards presented unique challenges for democratic representation. Faced with the urgency and scale of the problem pressure, elites of democratic societies had to take quick measures to ensure the health system could cope with the surge of coronavirus cases and to respond rapidly to the economic consequences of the crisis. The rapid spread of the virus implied that elites had to take such decisions without much time to consult with the general public. In the absence of a real public debate on the measures, a quintessential link of government responsiveness was broken. If there is no time to consult and debate

COVID-19: a dual challenge to European liberal democracy

“…Jørgensen et al (2021), in their eight-country comparison of pandemic-specific and broader political attitudes in 2020, record medium to high levels of support for government responses and note that high levels of interpersonal trust and self-assessed knowledge were critical in driving support. Political trust and partisanship as explanatory variables that affect public evaluations of government measures are explored by Altiparmakis et al (2021). They present comparative panel survey data from 11 countries and show that trust in national leaders was decisive in shaping public responses.…”

“…Shifts in state-society relations: a major theme in the present collection of articles is how publics across Europe responded to the profound transformation that their lives underwent. How did they evaluate the measures taken by governments (Altiparmakis et al 2021;Jørgensen et al 2021)? In whom did they place their trust (Kritzinger et al 2021;Heinzel and Liese 2021; see also Schraff 2020;Esaiasson et al 2020;Baekgaard et al 2020)?…”

Web-Based Smart Market Applications as a Preference Transition during COVID-19 Pandemic

“…According to governments in various parts of the world, the Covid-19 pandemic is to limit crowds to prevent the spread of the Covid-19 virus, including the Indonesian government [1]- [4]. The virus that began to be detected in Indonesian territory in early March 2020 made the Indonesian government take several policies to reduce the number of crowds in the community [5] [6].…”

A cure worse than the disease? Exploring the health-economy trade-off during COVID-19

“…The COVID-19 crisis represents a unique opportunity to study citizens' policy preference formation in 'hard times' (Bermeo and Bartels 2014). While several recent papers have analysed how general levels of public support for national governments changed since the outbreak of the pandemic (among others Altiparmakis et al 2021;Bol et al 2021;Leininger and Schaub 2020;Merkley 2020;Schraff 2020), only a few studies have explored how citizens evaluate governments' particular policy responses (Chorus et al 2020;Hargreaves Heap et al 2020;Tepe et al 2020). To investigate which policy measures citizens would prefer to see adopted in their country to cope with the multifaceted consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, we use a vignette experiment conducted in seven European countries in June 2020.…”