Post-Covid Government Trust and Pride

Miongsei Kang

miongsei@sejong.org

Senior Research Fellow

The Sejong Institute​ 

   It has been two years since the Covid-19 outbreak, but the world is still in a struggle. Covid-19 is not only a public health crisis, but also a pandemic that affects all fields. All await the development of vaccines and treatments, cooperating with the government's quarantine policy which is the only hope amid the threat of the pandemic. Covid-19 is both a health and a new challenge to democracy which requires a joint response to overcome it.

Since the outbreak, countries struggled to protect their citizens. In the absence of a cure, vaccine nationalism is on the rise, deepening international inequality against Covid-19. Some leaders are actively advocating Covid-19 nationalism, leading to Covid nationalism. The pandemic must be overcome by each country through international cooperation. However, as seen in China's case, some already adopted or are gradually adopting isolationism. The government in each country actively made efforts to respond against Covid-19 in consideration of people's resistance. The success of quarantine will have a significant impact on citizens' responses to the government's quarantine policy. The following questions are to understand the domestic response. "How do individuals react to government responses amid pandemic crisis?", "Also how will quarantine evaluation affect government trust?" This study aims to discuss how much the pandemic has affected government trust.

The data is a Covid Survey organized, processed, and provided by the Austrian Academy of Social Sciences. As a result of the study based on this survey, it is suggested that the following points influenced individual political choices in the election. First, the evaluation of quarantine had the most significant impact. Those who support the government's response trust the government more than those who do not. Second, trust in the medical system is closely related to trust in the government. Third, given that Covid-19 threatens the elder generation, elders' evaluation of the government's quarantine response is affected by their trust in quarantine measures.

The order of the research is as follows. The first part briefly describes the importance of government trust and provides an international comparison of government trust in 18 countries. In the second part, government trust is discussed from a relative perspective on the cohesion and blockade effects from related documents that argue that Covid-19 has affected government trust. Third, a discussion of the data (Value in Crisis International) and regression analysis is made. It also includes surveys from 18 countries and includes a survey on the impact of Covid-19 on government trust. Fourth, based on the results from regression analysis, the discussion is whether the international difference in government trust is the result of cohesion or punishment. Fifth, the factors that affected each of the 18 countries are discussed at a relative level. The sixth section summarizes the conclusions and discusses the main variables.