Political trust formation during the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany: The combined role of partisanship and evaluations of containment measures

Maurizio Schulz

Journal of Trust Research, 2025, vol. 15, issue 1, 60-83

Abstract: The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic triggered short-term ‘rally around the flag’ effects in various countries across Europe. Limited amount of research has examined its decline. This article aims to explore what role individual partisanship and evaluations of containment measures played in explaining levels of political trust in Germany over a one-year course of the pandemic. By employing OLS and FE regressions in a three-wave panel survey, I find a sharp decline in political trust after the second survey wave which hints to a breakdown of political trust formation into two phases. The trend analysis indicates that threat perceptions of the impact of containment measures on German society – but not on individuals – increasingly eroded trust in politics across various subgroups of respondents as the partisan trust gap narrowed over time.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/21515581.2024.2423292

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