How to explain citizens’ declined political trust during the COVID-19 pandemic: a time-series qualitative comparative analysis (TsQCA)

The COVID-19 pandemic gave a new impetus to the study of citizens’ political trust in times of crisis. Especially because trust is seen as an important precondition for citizens’ compliance with crisis measures, research into the determinants of citizens’ political trust became highly relevant. Contrary to trust research during previous crises, existing studies mostly focused on the beginning of the pandemic, when political trust increased in (almost) all EU countries, and less so on what happened after. Recently, this changed, and the aftermath of the increase gained more interest, but such research remains scarce and is mainly based on single country studies at the citizen level. We contribute to the existing literature by studying the decline in political trust between the summer of 2020 and the winter of 2021, when the pandemic peaked again. Through time-series qualitative comparative analysis, we study the (combinations of) conditions under which trust decreased in 28 European countries, including the increase over time in policy stringency and mortality, at the presence/absence of contestation and at the general level of trust in a country as conditions. We present three solution paths to explain the decline in trust which we study further in five in-depth case studies.