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How the coronavirus crisis affects citizen trust in institutions and in unknown others: Evidence from ‘the Swedish experiment’
Author(s) -
ESAIASSON PETER,
SOHLBERG JACOB,
GHERSETTI MARINA,
JOHANSSON BENGT
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
european journal of political research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.267
H-Index - 95
eISSN - 1475-6765
pISSN - 0304-4130
DOI - 10.1111/1475-6765.12419
Subject(s) - interpersonal communication , covid-19 , government (linguistics) , demographics , pandemic , population , sample (material) , political science , demographic economics , social psychology , psychology , demography , sociology , economics , medicine , disease , linguistics , philosophy , chemistry , pathology , chromatography , infectious disease (medical specialty)
We study how Swedish citizens updated their institutional and interpersonal trust as the corona crisis evolved from an initial phase to an acute phase in the spring of 2020. The study is based on a large web‐survey panel with adult Swedes (n = 11,406) in which the same individuals were asked the same set of questions at two different time points during the coronavirus pandemic ( t 0 and t 1 ). The sample was self‐selected but diverse (a smaller subsample, n = 1,464, was pre‐stratified to be representative of the Swedish population on key demographics). We find support for the view that the corona crisis led to higher levels of institutional and interpersonal trust. Moreover, reactions were largely homogeneous across those groups that could potentially relate distantly to government authorities.