Comparing the Implications of Strategies for Governing the <scp>COVID</scp> ‐19 Pandemic for the Political Robustness of Five European Political Regimes

ABSTRACT How do the strategies that governments employ when they encounter crisis‐induced turbulence affect the robustness of the political regime in which they operate? Comparative studies of the connection between government strategies and political regime robustness under different cultural and institutional conditions are few and far between. This article studies the vaccination strategies that governments in Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Hungary, and Italy employed in their respective responses to the COVID‐19 pandemic, and it assesses how these strategies affected the robustness of their political regimes in terms of citizen trust in government and public administration. The study finds that all five governments used a variety of strategies in their dealings with the pandemic; that citizens in different countries did not react in the same way to similar government strategies; and that strategies that get an incumbent government re‐elected may not be politically robust for the political regime or serve to uphold democratic principles.