Who rallies around the flag? Evidence from panel data during the Covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

Recent studies on political trust during the Covid-19 pandemic diagnosed a rally around the flag effect, leading to exceptionally high levels of trust in politics. While this finding has been established over various country-contexts, our understanding of the precise dynamics behind the rally effect remains limited. In this paper, we argue that health and economic risks, as well as partisanship condition the rally effect. Using individual-level panel data from the Netherlands, covering the time before and during the first Covid-19 wave, we show that the rally effect is particularly pronounced among older individuals, while it is absent among the young. Furthermore, we find a catch-up effect among the more distrusting part of the population, such as populist supporters and low-income earners, who largely drive the rally effect. This leads to a convergence of trust across different ideational and economic subpopulations, providing for a silver lining during otherwise turbulent times.

Science-related populism declining during the COVID-19 pandemic: A panel survey of the Swiss population before and after the Coronavirus outbreak

“…Second, we find that the decline of science-related populist attitudes was most pronounced among people who had been more prone to science-related populism before the COVID-19 pandemic. This corresponds with research showing that pandemic-induced rally dynamics are driven by a "catch-up effect," which suggests that (political) trust has increased most among subpopulations who had been more distrustful before the Coronavirus outbreak (Hegewald and Schraff, 2020). It also indicates that the pandemic may have contributed to a convergence rather than fragmentation of pro-and anti-science population segments (see Klinger et al, forthcoming).…”

“…But such shifts in public opinion may not be distributed equally across populations: During the COVID-19 pandemic, politics-related rally-round-the-flag dynamics seem more pronounced among people who are older and have lower income (Hegewald and Schraff, 2020). Science-related rally effects, in turn, might be less pronounced among people who are more religious, support populist ideas, and live in non-urban areas, as these milieus are more likely to endorse COVID-19 conspiracy theories (Eberl et al, 2021), reject vaccination against COVID-19 (Edwards et al, 2021), and criticize the values of pandemic researchers (Evans and Hargittai, 2020).…”

When the rally-around-the-flag effect disappears, or: when the COVID-19 pandemic becomes “normalized”

“…Over time, the study of the rally effect has been expanded to other areas, such as terrorism (Dinesen and Jaeger 2013;Woods 2011), and, recently, support for political leaders and government agencies during the initial outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic (e.g. Blais et al 2020;Bol et al 2020;Baekgaard et al 2020;De Vries et al 2020;Esaiasson et al 2020;Hegewald and Schraff 2020;Schraff 2020;Yam 2020).…”

The logics of COVID‐19 travel restrictions between European countries

“…Government parties also attempt to increase their political support. During the first wave of the pandemic, political factors did not exert a strong influence on the choice of restrictions (Plümper and Neumayer, 2020), mainly because a surprisingly strong rally round the flag effect made incumbent parties political winners of the pandemic and silenced oppositions (Baekgaard et al., 2020; Hegewald and Schraff, 2020; Bol et al., 2020). In March, April, and May 2020, virtually all dominant parties in European governments were able to increase their political support with voters—regardless of the measures they supported or implemented in fighting the pandemic.…”