COVID-19 and Political Trust in Local Governments: Evidence From Nepal
| Published date | 01 November 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14789299231220535 |
| Author | Charlotte Fiedler,Hugo Marcos-Marne,Karina Mross |
| Date | 01 November 2024 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/14789299231220535
Political Studies Review
2024, Vol. 22(4) 930 –947
© The Author(s) 2024
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/14789299231220535
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
COVID-19 and Political Trust in
Local Governments: Evidence
From Nepal
Charlotte Fiedler1, Hugo Marcos-Marne2
and Karina Mross1
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has reinvigorated debates about the drivers of political trust. Research
so far has mainly focused on national-level institutions, during the early stages of the pandemic
and using data from established democracies. However, how does this relationship look like if
we pay attention to subnational institutions in non-consolidated democracies, and further away
from the initial COVID-19 outbreak? To contribute to this line of research, this article focuses
on the local level and explores the association between individuals’ satisfaction with COVID-19
performance and political trust in Nepal. For that, it uses novel data collected via telephone
interviews (N = 1400) conducted between 25 April and 24 May 2021, during the second wave
of COVID-19. Our main results reveal that satisfaction with local institutions’ COVID-related
performance is significantly and robustly associated with levels of political trust at the local level.
The association holds even when geographical and time specifications are added, trust towards
national institutions or expectations about local governments are included in the analysis and the
dependent variable is disaggregated to discard measurement biases. The study thereby provides
important insights into the role performance plays for institutional trust beyond the national level
and in an unconsolidated democracy.
Keywords
political trust, crises, Nepal, local level, COVID-19
Accepted: 21 November 2023
Introduction
Throughout the world, governments have struggled with responding to the COVID-19
pandemic, seeing themselves forced to implement unpopular measures such as lock-
downs or social distancing. As the health crisis had a massive impact on people’s lives
1Research Programme on Transformation of Political (dis-) order, German Institute of Development and
Sustainability, Bonn, Germany
2Democracy Research Unit, Area of Political Science, Universidad de Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain
Corresponding author:
Charlotte Fiedler, German Institute of Development and Sustainability, 53113 Bonn, Germany.
Email: charlotte.fiedler@idos-research.de
1220535PSW0010.1177/14789299231220535Political Studies ReviewFiedler et al.
research-article2024
Article
Fiedler et al. 931
and required large-scale and often drastic government measures, it offers an exceptional
opportunity to investigate the link between government performance and trust, a key
question in political science research. The virus kept the world in suspense and many
government measures substantially impacted on people’s lives, which facilitated a high
awareness of the situation, increasing in turn the odds that people will have formed an
opinion on how satisfied they are with the response (i.e. that people truly assess how
governments performed in this situation, rather than using heuristics).
While political trust has been used successfully to explain compliance with anti-corona
measures, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on political trust are still under discus-
sion (Devine et al., 2021). This growing field has produced valuable insights, but studies
so far focus almost exclusively on the national level, although, in many countries, subna-
tional government units played an important role in designing and implementing govern-
ment responses (Dutta and Fischer, 2020; Hirschfeld and Thielsch, 2022). Furthermore,
most studies analyse levels of trust in Western democracies following the early stages of
the pandemic (see for example Bol et al., 2020; Kritzinger et al., 2021; Schraff, 2020).
Our study uses the COVID pandemic as an exceptional opportunity to contribute to
research on political trust by leveraging on the relevance of government action amid this
situation of crisis. In doing so, we go beyond previous research by looking at (1) the role
the pandemic played for political trust in local governments; (2) analysing the relation-
ship during the second wave of the pandemic, when citizens’ have had time to know and
assess government performance; and (3) investigating this link in the emerging democ-
racy of Nepal.
Drawing upon novel data from an original phone survey conducted with 1400 respond-
ents in Nepal, our analysis shows that satisfaction with local institutions’ COVID-related
performance is significantly and robustly associated with higher levels of political trust at
the local level. The association holds even when geographical and time specifications are
added, trust towards national institutions or expectations about local governments are
included in the analysis and the dependent variable is disaggregated to discard measure-
ment biases.
The article is structured as follows: after the introduction, we discuss the current state
of research and our theoretical expectations that we derive from the literature. The
‘Research Design’ section introduces the research design including case selection, data
generation and methodology before we present the analysis and results in the ‘Results’
section. Implications and limitations of the article are discussed in the final section of the
article, paying special attention to how we deal with issues of endogeneity and reversed
causality.
Crises, Performance and Political Trust at the Local Level
Political trust, broadly defined as ‘a basic evaluative orientation toward the government’
(Hetherington, 1998: 791), is crucial for democracies insofar as it affects several impor-
tant aspects such as participation, compliance and cooperation (Levi and Stoker, 2000).
Accordingly, it is not surprising that a large strand of research has been historically
devoted to understanding political (dis)trust (see, for example, Citrin and Stoker, 2018;
Zmerli and van der Meer, 2017).
Research on the effects of natural disasters has provided relevant insights into the
performance–trust relationship by suggesting that extreme events can alter trust levels
both positively and negatively. Hurricane Katrina in 2005 in the United States was found
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