Trust and the Coronavirus Pandemic: What are the Consequences of and for Trust? An Early Review of the Literature
| Author | Will Jennings,Daniel Devine,Gerry Stoker,Jennifer Gaskell |
| Published date | 01 May 2021 |
| Date | 01 May 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1478929920948684 |
| Subject Matter | COVID-19: Pandemics, Global Politics and Societal ChallengesState of the Art |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1478929920948684
Political Studies Review
2021, Vol. 19(2) 274 –285
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1478929920948684
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Trust and the Coronavirus
Pandemic: What are the
Consequences of and for
Trust? An Early Review of
the Literature
Daniel Devine1, Jennifer Gaskell2,
Will Jennings2 and Gerry Stoker2
Abstract
Trust between governors and the governed is seen as essential to facilitating good governance.
This claim has become a prominent contention during the coronavirus pandemic. The crisis also
presents a unique test of key hypotheses in the trust literature. Moreover, understanding the
dynamics of trust, how it facilitates and hinders policy responses, and also the likely effects of
these responses on trust are going to be fundamental questions in policy and trust research
in the future. In this article, we review the early literature on the coronavirus pandemic and
political and social trust, summarise their findings and highlight key challenges for future research.
We show how the studies shed light on trust’s association with implementation of government
measures, public compliance with them, mortality rates and the effect of government action on
levels of trust. We also urge caution given the varying ways of measuring trust and operationalising
the impact of the pandemic, the existence of common issues with quantitative studies and the
relatively limited geographical scope of studies to date. We argue that it is going to be important
to have a holistic understanding of these dynamics, using mixed-methods research as well as the
quantitative studies we review here.
Keywords
coronavirus, COVID-19, political trust, social trust, review
Accepted: 20 July 2020
Academic research on the social and economic consequences of the coronavirus
pandemic1 has grown exponentially since its onset. Insights from the social and behav-
ioural sciences relevant to the pandemic response are already being debated (Van Bavel
1Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
2Politics and International Relations, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK
Corresponding author:
Daniel Devine, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, Manor Road
Building, Oxford OX1 3UQ, UK.
Email: Daniel.Devine@st-hildas.ox.ac.uk
948684PSW0010.1177/1478929920948684Political Studies ReviewDevine et al.
review-article2020
State of the Art - Review Article
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