The Reciprocal Relationship between Behavior during COVID-19 and Political Trust

• In Event: Trust & Politics

Abstract

Governmental officials assume that political trust makes citizens follow government rules. The government, hence, assumed that people stayed at home, wore masks, and got vaccinated during the COVID-19 days because citizens trust governments. This assumption is true in the sense that political trust works as a lubricant between policies and citizens, which is claimed in a massive political trust literature. Thus, we might easily jump to a conclusion that people stayed at home, wore masks, and got vaccinated several times because they trust their governments. Is this causation true? Is the relationship so simple? This paper aims to disentangle the complicated relationship between political trust and citizens’ behavior during COVID-19 days.

I hypothesize that people trust their government more than before if they followed the government policies such as wearing masks. Here, the causal relationship is reversed. People trust governments because they follow the government's rules. This logic comes from Hetherington’s Sacrifice Theory that people have to trust the government when the enacted policy requires perceived sacrifice or perceived risk. As one case bolstering this theory, I found that Tokyo residents who did not evacuate from the alleged radioactive contaminated area in accordance with the government’s policy in March 2011 are more likely to show favorable attitudes toward then government than those who evacuated against the government policy. That is, people show more favorable attitudes toward the government because they followed the policy.

If this hypothesis is true, people who stayed at home, wore masks, and got vaccinated over three times during the pandemic days are more likely to show favorable attitudes toward the current government and stronger trust in the government. Using the online survey data collected in Japan and employing structural equation models, this project tries to depict the clearer relationship between political trust and behavior during the pandemic. The results will make us rethink what political trust means and thus what democracy means.

Author

• Miwa Nakajo, Tsuda University