Trust and accountability in times of pandemic

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic took place against the backdrop of growing political polarization and distrust in political institutions in many countries. Furthermore, most governments fell short of expectations in their management of the pandemic. Did deficiencies in government performance further erode trust in public institutions? Did citizens’ ideology interfere with the way they processed information on government performance? To investigate these two questions, we conducted a preregistered online experiment in Spain in November 2020. Respondents in the treatment group were provided information on the number of contact tracers in their region, a key variable under the control of regional governments. We find that individuals greatly overestimate the number of contact tracers in their region. When we provide the actual number of contact tracers, we find a decline in trust in governments, a reduction in willingness to fund public institutions and a decrease in COVID-19 vaccine acceptance. We also find that individuals endogenously change their attribution of responsibilities when receiving the treatment. In regions where the regional and central governments are controlled by different parties, sympathizers of the regional incumbent react to the negative news on performance by attributing greater responsibility for it to the central government. We call this the blame shifting effect. In those regions, the negative information does not translate into lower voting intentions for the regional incumbent government. These results suggest that the exercise of political accountability may be particularly difficult in settings with high political polarization and areas of responsibility are not clearly delineated.

For Better or Worse? Subjective Expectations and Cost-Benefit Trade-Offs in Health Behavior

“…67 Using a high-frequency large-scale online survey, Fancourt, Steptoe and Wright (2020) notice that trust in the government (but not in other dimensions) sharply fell soon after the Cummings episode in England (but not in the other nations belonging to the United Kingdom). The importance of political accountability and trust is also studied by Martinez-Bravo and Sanz (2023) in the Spain. Interestingly, Bird et al (2023) find that, in Latin America, political trust predicted less compliance (more mobility), unlike in high-income countries.…”

Social and political trust diverge during a crisis

“…Some of these findings also highlighted that satisfaction with governmental responses, together with the need for unity and political stability, emerged as the main factors that influenced political trust during the pandemic 48 . Other studies documented that the positive perception of the government's response to the pandemic was key to sustain high levels of political trust [49][50][51] . In particular, Martinez-Bravo and Sanz 50 showed that priming individuals with negative cues on regional pandemic management policies affected political trust.…”

“…Other studies documented that the positive perception of the government's response to the pandemic was key to sustain high levels of political trust [49][50][51] . In particular, Martinez-Bravo and Sanz 50 showed that priming individuals with negative cues on regional pandemic management policies affected political trust.…”

Institutional trust in the time of corona: Evidence from countermeasures in Germany

“…The specific literature on institutional trust in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic has focused on the role of trust for behaviors and outcomes at the individual and group levels (Brodeur et al 2021;Sarracino et al 2021;Martinez-Bravo and Sanz 2022;Suhay et al 2022;Fanny Lalot et al 2022;Schomaker et al 2020;Jäckle et al 2023;Woelfert and Kunst 2020). Existing studies considering countermeasures have focused on trust as a mediator or moderator variable, primarily for prosocial behaviors, health outcomes and pandemic management (Bargain and Aminjonov 2020;O'Hara et al 2020;Pak et al 2021).…”

“…Existing studies into the impact of policy restrictions have focused on economic impacts of hard lockdowns, including employment and growth (Demirgüç-Kunt et al 2021;König and Winkler 2021;Kok 2020;Ueda et al 2021), food prices (Akter 2020) and stock markets (Aggarwal et al 2021;Yang and Deng 2021;Ashraf 2020;Kizys et al 2021). Another body of work has studied compliance with hard lockdown measures, such as stay-at-home measures, including the role of trust, which appear to play a key role for acceptance and compliance of policies (Bargain and Aminjonov 2020;Brodeur et al 2021;Pak et al 2021;Sarracino et al 2021;Martinez-Bravo and Sanz 2022;Suhay et al 2022;Fanny Lalot et al 2022;Schomaker et al 2020;Jäckle et al 2023;Woelfert and Kunst 2020). These studies mainly found higher compliance when individuals trust in institutions (see e.g.…”