Containment, social protection, and confidence in public institutions and government: Global evidence from 144 countries during the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic required governments to balance restrictive containment policies with measures to mitigate their socioeconomic consequences, raising questions about the relationship between these policy responses and public confidence and trust. Existing research has largely examined containment and economic support separately, often within individual countries or during the pandemic's initial months. We constructed a global country-level panel by integrating administrative policy data with survey measures of public confidence from the Gallup World Poll, covering 144 countries from 2006 to 2023. Using regression models with country and pre-pandemic year fixed effects, this study examined how changes in institutional and government confidence were associated with lockdown trajectories (sustained low-level, rapidly easing, and sustained high-level) and the scale, breadth, and composition of social protection responses. We found that countries following sustained high-level lockdown trajectories generally experienced less favorable changes in confidence than those following rapidly easing trajectories. Under sustained high-level lockdowns, greater social protection spending and a larger number of social protection measures were generally associated with more favorable changes in confidence. Income protection spending was more positively associated with institutional confidence than job protection spending under sustained high-level lockdowns, but this distinction was not supported for government confidence or trust. These findings highlight the importance of considering containment and social protection jointly and suggest that income protection may be particularly relevant to institutional confidence during prolonged restrictions, with broader implications for governing large-scale crises. Points to Practitioners Restrictive crisis measures may be less likely to erode citizens' confidence in public institutions and government when accompanied by broad social protection. Income protection may be particularly relevant for sustaining confidence in public institutions during prolonged restrictions. Crisis strategies should consider containment and social protection together rather than treating them as separate policy domains.