How do Covid-19 emergency policies relate to political trust? : a cross-country analysis

The paper investigates the influence of the measures implemented by national governments to curb the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic on the citizens' trust in government, within European countries. Data collected from the Eurofound's Living, Working and Covid-19 survey and data from the Oxford Covid-19 Government response tracker database has been analysed through the employment of a multivariate OLS regression model. Overall, the analysis shows a negative relation between the emergency policies implemented by governments and political trust when considered at aggregated level. However, when considered at a disaggregated level, different kinds of emergency policies yield diverse relations with trust in government.