COVID-19, Political Accountability, and Democracy

• In Event: Support for Democracy and Distributive Policies

Abstract

Beyond its immediate impact on public health and the economy, the COVID-19 pandemic puts democracy under stress. We use a pre-registered survey and experiment covering 12 countries and 22,500 respondents to examine the impact of the pandemic on public beliefs about political leaders and the functioning of democratic politics and institutions. In a first step, we show that information treatments shape people’s beliefs about the severity of the crisis and their evaluation of the government’s response. In a second step, we leverage the experimental treatments to causally identify the effects of evaluations of the government on satisfaction with democracy and support for alternative institutions. Instrumental variable estimates suggest that the evaluation of the government’s response on the sanitary and economic dimensions have approximately equal weight on the overall satisfaction with the government. This dissatisfaction with the government decreases satisfaction with democracy and perceived political efficacy, but it does not translate into an embrace of non-democratic alternatives.

Authors

• Michael Becher, IE School of Global and Public Affairs

• Nicolas Longuet Marx, Columbia University

• Vincent Pons, Harvard Business School