15:30 - 17:45
Thursday-Panel
Chair/s:
William L Allen
Discussant/s:
Dominik Schraff
Meeting Room I

Dominik Schraff, Sven Hegewald
Ethnic diversity and political trust during the Covid-19 pandemic

William Allen, Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij
Winning the Battle or Worst of the Bunch? How COVID-19 Mortality Data Impacts Perceptions of Government Performance and Health Attitudes

Daniel Devine, Hannah Willis, Will Jennings, Gerry Stoker, Lawrence McKay, Jennifer Gaskell, Viktor Valgardsson
The causes of trust in government: evidence from conjoint experiments

Jakob-Moritz Eberl, Robert Huber, Esther Greussing
From Populism to the ‘Plandemic’: Why populists believe in COVID-19 conspiracies

Constanza Sanhueza
Severity, economic relief or transparency? Experimental evidence on support of and compliance with Covid-19 prevention measures across Europe
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Winning the Battle or Worst of the Bunch? How COVID-19 Mortality Data Impacts Perceptions of Government Performance and Health Attitudes
William Allen 1, Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij 2
1 University of Oxford, Department of Politics and International Relations
2 Birkbeck, University of London, Department of Philosophy

As governments have implemented interventions addressing COVID-19, mortality statistics have varied over time and among countries. But what impact, if any, does this information have on attitudes relevant for politics and public health? In a pre-registered experiment (N = 2,915), we showed UK respondents an image displaying the UK’s cumulative COVID-19 deaths—which remain the highest in Europe—either in isolation or alongside nine other European countries having fewer deaths. Mortality figures in either format did not significantly impact respondents’ concern about the pandemic, support for restrictions, or anticipated behaviors. However, respondents seeing UK-only data, particularly those holding lower trust in government (which was an exploratory test conducted after pre-registration), evaluated the UK’s response more positively compared to the control group. This was the opposite direction from what we had predicted at the pre-registration stage. By contrast, those seeing the UK’s mortalities in context—particularly respondents holding higher trust in government (again, an exploratory test)—expressed more negative evaluations compared to those who saw the UK-only data, which was in line with our pre-registered hypotheses. We attribute these divergent patterns to whether cumulative mortalities or rates of change were more apparent: respondents associated the declining rate rather than high gross figures with government “winning the battle” when relative benchmarks were not present, but punished the incumbent government when its standing among peers as the “worst of the bunch” in terms of cumulative deaths was made visibly salient. Our results highlight the political stakes of information and its communication during crises.

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