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. Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2021.1930754.