A Matter of Trust? Political Trust and the Covid-19 Pandemic

Mohammad Reza Farzanegan () and Hans Philipp Hofmann

No 9121, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: There is significant cross-country variation in Covid-19 fatalities worldwide. In this study, we analyze the relationship between political trust and fatalities of the Covid-19 pandemic. By performing a cross-country analysis and controlling for other determinants, we find that government trust is negatively associated with Covid-19 cases and deaths. Additionally, our findings suggest that risk communication, in the form of public information campaigns, only decreased Covid-19 cases and deaths in countries with high trust in government. We also find evidence that political trust decreases the risk of removing lockdown policies.

Keywords: Covid-19; pandemic; trust; lockdown; cross-country regression; voluntary compliance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea, nep-pol and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp9121.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_9121

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().