A Calamitous Connection: Declining Political Trust Amplifies the Negative Effect of Growing Concerns about Democracy on the Acceptance of Anti-pandemic Policies

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, numerous studies have been published on people’s attitudes toward government measures designed to curb the spread of the virus (see, for an overview, Moran et al., 2021). Most of them are snapshots of this long and ongoing public health crisis. Several analyses show, among other things, that concerns about the pandemic (e.g., Moran et al., 2021) and political trust (e.g., Altiparmakis et al., 2021) affect public acceptance of anti-pandemic government measures. How these predictors work together has been explored to a much lesser extent, however. A remarkable exception is the study by Lalot, Heering, Rullo, Travaglino, and Abrams (2022). Based on a survey taken in March 2020, they show that concerns and trust reinforce each other in terms of their effects on people’s willingness to comply with anti-pandemic policies. This research note builds on this finding and expands on it in two ways. First, we differentiate between concerns about health and concerns about democracy as these concerns can be expected to have opposite effects on the acceptance of anti-COVID-19 policies. Second, we take a dynamic perspective. Using data from a three-wave panel survey conducted in Germany in May 2020, November 2020, and February 2021, we examine in an established Western democracy how changes in political trust moderate the effects of changes in concerns about health and of changes in concerns about democracy, respectively, on policy acceptance.