Trust and the Coronavirus Pandemic: What are the Consequences of and for Trust? An Early Review of the Literature

Abstract

Trust between governors and the governed is seen as essential to facilitating good governance. This claim has become a prominent contention during the coronavirus pandemic. The crisis also presents a unique test of key hypotheses in the trust literature. Moreover, understanding the dynamics of trust, how it facilitates and hinders policy responses, and also the likely effects of these responses on trust are going to be fundamental questions in policy and trust research in the future. In this article, we review the early literature on the coronavirus pandemic and political and social trust, summarise their findings and highlight key challenges for future research. We show how the studies shed light on trust’s association with implementation of government measures, public compliance with them, mortality rates and the effect of government action on levels of trust. We also urge caution given the varying ways of measuring trust and operationalising the impact of the pandemic, the existence of common issues with quantitative studies and the relatively limited geographical scope of studies to date. We argue that it is going to be important to have a holistic understanding of these dynamics, using mixed-methods research as well as the quantitative studies we review here.

COVID-19: effective policymaking depends on trust in experts, politicians, and the public

“…Key factors include: shared characteristics (such as beliefs, norms, or expectations); reputations (for being reliable, predictable, honest); behavior (repeated interaction, face to face contact); and, authority (such as the power to achieve a stated outcome). In each case, we should not assume that trust development is necessarily "good" (Devine et al 2020). For example, people are susceptible to well-told stories with a hero and moral, and prone to trust a narrator's story if it reinforces the story they tell themselves or if people feel like they know the narrator (Jones, McBeth, and Shanahan 2014;Tuckett and Nikolic 2017).…”

“…However, the relationship between public compliance with government policy and trust in government is not that clear, and it varies according to factors such as personal and family exposure to COVID-19 (Devine et al 2020). The nascent evidence suggests that high initial compliance with the lockdown related primarily to the perceived threat of COVID-19 (Devine et al 2020), "social norms" (Jackson et al 2020), sympathy with a Prime Minister in hospital with COVID-19, and national solidarity symbolized by a universal lockdown (Devine et al 2020: 6). Focus group respondents described a general faith in government during initial uncertainty (akin to trusting a doctor) and empathy with ministers facing a difficult task (Gaskell et al 2020).…”

“…Therefore, it has a strong impact on policy design, ownership, and commitment to the results. However, trust is not unconditionally good, since it can prompt uncritical support (Devine et al 2020) or cooperation with some at the expense of others (Putnam 2000, 21-22). Distrust (or mistrust) in others can be a potent motivator, prompting people to ignore evidence and advice or defy government instruction (Citrin and Stoker 2018).…”

Covid-19 and the digital revolution

“…Analysis of the policy responses from cities that tended to manage the pandemic most effectively identified several factors that may have contributed to their relative success: they had open, transparent and accountable leadership, and a partnership environment in which public, private and civic organisations, and social networks could all work to deliver different types of services to a range of stakeholders. The role of reliable information provided in a manner that reduced confusion, together with the level of public trust in institutions was also paramount (Devine, Gaskell, Jennings, & Stoker, 2020;Henderson et al, 2020).…”

COVID-19 Is Examining the EU and the Member States: The Role of Attitudes and Sociodemographic Factors on Citizens’ Support Towards National Policies

“…Other studies have examined a similar topic with presidential vote intention or institutional trust as dependent variables (Bol et al (2020); Harell, 2020; Leininger and Shaub, 2020; Merley et al, 2020; Schraff, 2020). In this sense, Devine et al (2020) contend that the pandemic has presented a unique opportunity to analyze the main theories in the trust literature. Second, our dataset is based on individual answers from a broad survey administered in 21 different EU countries, meanwhile the majority of the previous studies are only based in one country, so multinational comparisons are still scarce.…”