Political Trust as a Judgement Heuristic in Predicting Readiness to Comply With Governmental Restrictions During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Introduction

How modern societies respond to the challenges of the contemporary world depends not just on the capacity of the public institutions and effectiveness of administrative decision-making, but also on how well-prepared each society as a whole is to address these challenges, and how members of the society perceive and react to the decisions and policy initiatives of the authorities. The question of how to engage the public in following health behaviour guidelines during the COVID-19 pandemic has spurred some scientific debate over the last couple of years (Albarracin & Jung, 2021; Budd et al., 2020; Petersen et al., 2022). An emerging line of research suggests that a crucial role in public engagement is played by trust in the government and its policies (Guglielmi et al., 2020; Pagliaro et al, 2021; Schraff, 2020; Weinberg, 2020). Yet, the findings have not always been straightforward and some negative effects of social and political trust have also been demonstrated (Woelfert & Kunst, 2020). In addition, research has revealed complex patterns of interaction between trust in government and national policy responses to COVID-19: e.g., timely policy responses across Europe were dependent not only on the level of trust in government, but also on the degree of centralisation of system of medical care – countries with separate ministries of health responded faster (Toshkov et al., 2021). These findings add urgency to the recent discussion about the fundamental role of political trust in preserving democratic achievements in times of economic, political, and social crises (Van der Meer & Zmerli, 2017). Political trust represents an efficient tool in changing public attitudes and behaviours, and can be seen as a “shortcut” in getting the public messages over to the intended audiences, given that their political trust levels are sufficiently high, and as an obstacle to persuasion when the trust is low. For example, government's use of social media during the COVID-19 pandemic enhances citizens' trust in government, which leads to formation of an image of a good governance (Mansoor, 2021). Political trust is closely related to the evaluation of the performance of public institutions (Christensen & Lægreid, 2005), but it also represents a general attitude that is related to the level and quality of education (Hooghe et al, 2012; Kolczynska, 2020; Ugur-Cinar et al, 2020). As a psychological variable, political trust is a multifaceted construct (Gaina et al., 2019; Hamm et al., 2019), and it poses a theoretically and practically interesting question of which aspects of political trust are most closely related to support for, and compliance with, governmental policies and initiatives. In the present paper, we try to answer this question by examining how various aspects of political trust are related to the overall perception and compliance with governmental restrictions on the one hand, and how political trust compares with other predictors of compliance, on the other hand (such as the perceived risk, subjective evaluation of economic well-being, and demographic variables—see below for a brief review).