The Effects of Political Trust on Protest against Government’s COVID-19 Measures

• In Event: Poster Session: Comparative Politics I

Abstract

How does the interplay of political trust and grievances affect protest in varying countries? Since a temporary decrease following governments' initial restrictive policy measures to contain coronavirus in early 2020, overall, despite fluctuations, the number of protest activities during the pandemic recorded approximately 7% increase on average compared to 2019. What is worth noting is that protest events during the pandemic have not been confined in a certain region or a regime type but took place broadly across different continents and both in many developed and developing countries, as well as both in democratic and authoritarian regimes. Furthermore, protest during the pandemic rose out of divergent and even incompatible claims/reasons, such as desperate grievances out of economic hardship and infringement of individuals’ freedom, which can be characterized as a co-existence of ‘movements of crisis’ and ‘movements of affluence’ in Kerbo’s (1982) terms. This implies that, unlike our conventional knowledge directs, a society’s economic pre-conditions and/or political opportunity structures including regime types in a traditional sense have not played as an essential role in triggering protest in this time as before.
Extant literature on the relationship between political trust and protest reports contradictory expectations and empirical results since trust in government comes into play through two different mechanisms: one, satisfaction about government’s current performances and positive expectations about its future performances, and two, increased political efficacy. In this context, the COVID-19 pandemic presents a unique experimental opportunity of testing the confounding relationship between political trust and protest activities considering two opposite aspects. On the one hand, political trust is postulated to play a cardinal role in people’s compliance with government’s policy measures, which could lead to fewer protests in a country. On the other hand, however, past research on the role of political trust in collective action found that those who trust government more are more likely to participate in political protest when they feel government is not treating people fairly. In this sense, the grieved, in particular, people pointing out discriminatory aspects of government’s Covid-related measures would protest more in a society with a high level of political trust.
Hence, to unfold the ambiguous relationship between political trust and protest, it is imperative to investigate grievances more closely and how it is directly linked with trust in government. Since governments, rather than other political institutions, took the lead in responding to the Covid-19 in most of the countries, I narrow down my focus onto what kind of grievances people have had as for government’s (mis)management of the pandemic. Have the grievances come from something that government appeared to create/exacerbate or something that government was unable to control so that everyone cannot but bear as a part of making it through the difficulty? As the pandemic emerged out of the blue for everyone, it has laid out a situation where trust in government directly has framed how people perceive negative consequences of the pandemic and affected the extent to which they approve of the ways government tackles the pandemic, thereby how people address their grievances. In other words, whether people’s grievances are expressed as political protest depends mainly on the interaction between the types of grievances people suffer and the level of people’s trust in government.
In this paper, I analyze protest events against government’s Covid-related policy measures that occurred more than in 30 countries between March 2020 and December 2021. I examine whether and how people’s trust in their government mitigates the ways they address Covid-related grievances in a form of protest activities. I argue that political trust in a society plays a disparate role in transforming people’s grievances into political activities depending on the types of grievances that the pandemic yielded. This sheds light on not only the multifaceted dimensions of political trust but also on the heterogeneous ways of trust influencing people’s conception of how to overcome the national crisis as a whole community and the role of government in this time across different societal settings. I find that not only political trust but also social trust among fellow citizens significantly bears to the process of people’s framing the pandemic adversities as well as expressing their various grievances in a form of collective action.

Author

• Kyu Young Lee, Prairie View A&M University