Political trust in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic: a meta-analysis of 67 studies

ABSTRACT

Trust in political actors and institutions has long been seen as essential for effective democratic governance. During the COVID-19 pandemic, trust was widely identified as key for mitigation of the crisis through its influence on compliance with public policy, vaccination and many other social attitudes and behaviours. We study whether trust did indeed predict these outcomes through a meta-analysis of 67 studies and 426 individual effect sizes derived from nearly 1.5 million observations worldwide. Political trust as an explanatory variable has small to moderate correlations with outcomes such as vaccine uptake, belief in conspiracy theories, and compliance. These correlations are heterogenous, and we show that trust in health authorities is more strongly related to vaccination than trust in the government;but compliance is more strongly related to the government than other institutions. Moreover, the unique case of the United States indicates that trust in President Trump had negative effects across all observed outcomes, except in increasing conspiracy beliefs. Our analysis also shows that research design features (such as response scales) and publication bias do not importantly change the results. These results indicate that trust was important for the management of the pandemic and supports existing work highlighting the importance of political trust.