Political trust during the Covid-19 pandemic: Rally around the flag or lockdown effects?

Area of Science:

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Public Health

Background:

• The Covid-19 pandemic prompted a rise in diffuse political support.
• Existing research suggests lockdown measures drove this support.
• An alternative hypothesis posits that pandemic intensity itself is the key factor.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the drivers of increased political support during the Covid-19 pandemic.
• To differentiate between the effects of lockdown policies and pandemic severity on political trust.
• To understand the psychological mechanisms underlying citizen responses to a major health crisis.

Main Methods:

• Utilized a representative Dutch household survey data from March 2020.
• Employed flexible modeling techniques to analyze the dynamic relationship between pandemic spread and political trust.
• Compared the impact of lockdown measures against the effect of rising Covid-19 case numbers.

Main Results:

• The perceived effect of lockdown measures on political support was explained by pre-existing time trends.
• After accounting for temporal non-linearities, the lockdown effect vanished.
• A robust positive association was found between Covid-19 infection rates and political trust.
• Standard predictors of political trust, like economic and social evaluations, diminished in importance during the pandemic's spread.

Conclusions:

• The rise in political support during the Covid-19 pandemic was primarily driven by collective anxiety related to infection rates, not lockdown policies.
• This anxiety-driven "rally effect" temporarily sidelines cognitive evaluations, leading citizens to seek stability in political institutions.
• Emotional responses to the pandemic's intensity significantly influence political trust, overshadowing traditional socio-economic factors.