Working Paper: NBER ID: w29514
Authors: Michael Becher; Nicolas Longuet Marx; Vincent Pons; Sylvain Brouard; Martial Foucault; Vincenzo Galasso; Eric Kerrouche; Sandra Len Alfonso; Daniel Stegmueller
Abstract: Crises of the magnitude of the Covid-19 pandemic may plausibly affect deep-seated attitudes of a large fraction of citizens. In particular, outcome-oriented theories imply that leaders' performance in response to such adverse events shapes people's views about the government and about democracy. To assess these causal linkages empirically, we use a pre-registered survey experiment covering 12 countries and 22,500 respondents during the pandemic. Our design enables us to leverage exogenous variation in evaluations of policies and leaders with an instrumental variables strategy. We find that people use information on both health and economic performance when evaluating the government. In turn, dissatisfaction with the government decreases satisfaction with how democracy works, but it does not increase support for non-democratic alternatives. The results suggests that comparatively bad government performance mainly spurs internal critiques of democracy.
Keywords: government performance; democracy; COVID-19; survey experiment; public attitudes
JEL Codes: D72; D83
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Dissatisfaction with government performance (H11) | Decreased satisfaction with democracy (D72) |
| Evaluations of health performance (I14) | Evaluations of government performance (H11) |
| Evaluations of economic performance (P47) | Evaluations of government performance (H11) |
| Dissatisfaction with government performance (H11) | No increase in support for non-democratic alternatives (D79) |