A new democratic norm(al)? Political legitimacy amidst the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

The worldwide COVID-19 pandemic has granted national governments far-reaching political powers to implement drastic non-pharmaceutical interventions to curtail the spread of the virus. For these measures to be effective, governments should be granted widespread political legitimacy. This is established when populations' expectations from governments are in line with public support for these governments. In this chapter, we investigate changes in political legitimacy during the coronavirus crisis in the Netherlands. Amidst of the pandemic, we collected unique, representative data among LISS-panel respondents that supplemented the European Values Study 2017. We demonstrate that the Dutch public (temporarily) lowered their democratic aspirations thereby longing for strong leadership while simultaneously increasing their trust in the incumbent Government, which, combined, resulted in more political legitimacy. Because of an outspoken period effect, expectations are, however, that this legitimacy will not be long-lived in the new common.