Eroding the Partisan Partition? A Cross-National Analysis of Pandemic Mistrust

• In Event: Political Trust

Abstract

The idea that some measure of political mistrust is necessary and even healthy for accountable governance is widely appreciated. Indeed, democracies were founded on distrust and differ from other regimes in their ability to limit the ways that distrust drifts into institutional dysfunction (Bachmann 2018). However, populism, the pandemic and protest have recently upended conventional findings associated with “vertical trust,” which expresses the relationship between citizens and those empowered to act on behalf of a public interest. Politically neutral and (formally) impartial institutions such as the courts and the civil service – sometimes referred to as “regulatory institutions” – constitute one dimension of this relationship, and they typically enjoy higher levels of trust than the other dimension, including politicians and institutions subject to partisan control (Newton et al. 2018). Democracies supposedly differ from other regimes by effectively channeling most of the mistrust in “regulatory” institutions such as courts and bureaucracies into political competition (Warren 2018). This partisan partition has crumbled in numerous ways, most dramatically illustrated when in 2020, trust in American police dropped below majority levels for the first time in 27 years (Brenan 2020). How often does this mistrust in partisan controlled institutions now align with mistrust in impartial institutions? And do democracies indeed have an advantage in their ability to “channel” mistrust into politics?

We answer these questions in one of the first major cross-national comparisons exploring the impact of vertical trust on support for pandemic response measures. Using the Eurobarometer and the Arab Barometer surveys comparing data across 44 countries, we show that there is a consistent and positive relationship between the two different dimensions of vertical trust identified above, and support for pandemic response measures; these relationships hold even when controlling for government approval and various demographic factors. Our preliminary results confirm that trust is important in creating effective pandemic responses. More generally, we maintain that mistrust in public health measures during the pandemic proxies for popular mistrust in expertise implied by vertical relationships. Furthermore, we speculate that the unreliability of regime type to predict the efficacy of pandemic responses is rooted in political conditions that bring both dimensions of trust into alignment.

Authors

• Carl LeVan, American University

• James Bryan, American University