Testing Negative: The Non-Consequences of COVID-19 on Mass Political Attitudes

• In Event: Public Perceptions of and Government Responses to Health Crises

Abstract

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, governments have implemented economic and social policies that, outside of war time, are unprecedented in scale and scope. These interventions make apparent that the state has the capacity to act as an extremely powerful guarantor of economic and health security -- a view that has not always been so prominent in western democracies of late. Moreover, the economic and health threats posed by COVID-19 reach far beyond the demographic groups that are more typically beneficiaries of state support. As such, a plausible hypothesis is that the pandemic and its policy responses may have yielded notable changes in mass ideology -- e.g. attitudes regarding the role of government in the economy; the `deservingness' of beneficiaries of state support; the extent to which economic inequality is normatively acceptable; and the value of contributing taxes to state-provided public goods. In this paper, we test this expectation using data from the long-running (2014--present) British Election Study Internet Panel, as well as from a unique panel survey fielded to existing BES respondents in April and September 2020. Our panel makes it possible to track individuals on a rich set of variables both before and during the pandemic. We find that exposure to covid-related economic shocks had some effects on `political' attitudes such as trust and approval of the government, but much more limited effects on ideological beliefs about the appropriate role and scope of government in economic and social policy. We also analyse the mechanisms behind this lack of responsiveness, including the low visibility of government support policies during the pandemic.

Authors

• Jack Blumenau, UCL

• Timothy Hicks, University College London

• Scott Matthews, Memorial University

• Tom O'Grady, University College London

• Alan M. Jacobs, University of British Columbia