Adapting to the COVID Crisis: Perceptions of Performance and Democratic Support across Four States

• In Event: Public Opinion and Political Support

Abstract

In this paper we will report the results of new cross-national surveys (The Political Communities Surveys – Trans-Atlantic Partnership (T-AP) Cross-National Adaptive Democracy Study) conducted in four democratic societies: the US, the UK, Poland and Canada (n=9,200). The purpose of these surveys is to delve more deeply than ever before into citizens’ perceptions of various aspects of the political systems in each of these polities. They allow us to parse out variations in support for political authorities, government institutions, the workings of the political process, regime principles, and political communities as well as to rigorously test a gamut of prominent theoretically relevant explanations for variations in support for these political objects.

In this paper, we focus specifically on understanding citizens’ perceptions of their respective governments’ handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and the various challenges that this crisis introduced in these societies. We also explore the factors that account for such perceptions, including people’s different lived experiences over the course of the pandemic to determine how such evaluations affected democratic support (both evaluative and affective) for different objects in their political systems.

Authors

• Kerry Tannahill, Concordia University

• Sophie Courchesne, Concordia University

• Mebs Kanji, Concordia University

• Thomas Bryer, University of Central Florida

• Jo Crotty, University of Sunderland

• Victoria Foster, Edge Hill University

• Tomasz Gajderowicz, University of Warsaw

• Piotr Modzelewski, University of Warsaw

• Jacob Obodai, Edge Hill University

• Sofia Rivera Prysmakova, Kennesaw State University

• Nancy Yacoub, Concordia University