Trust and Governance in the Age of Covid-19
On 19th December, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a strict U-turn on the planned ‘Christmas window’, which would have allowed families to get together for up to five days over the festive period. Whilst the initial decision to offer the window was reckless and ultimately untenable in light of rising Covid-19 case numbers, the choice to reverse the announcement came late in the day and extinguished a ray of public optimism after an incredibly difficult year. Instead, many people will be unable to see friends or family at all this Christmas and they will go into the New Year with much tighter restrictions on work, leisure, and travel. There is no doubt, then, that the Government is asking a lot of people at a time when they are already suffering from ‘Covid fatigue’. Will they listen? Will they comply? Who will support these new rules?
In a new peer-reviewed publication in the journal Political Studies, I analyse data collected at the height of our first national lockdown that may have relevance for the ongoing governance operation ahead. Focusing on the psychology of governing through a crisis, I find that particular facets of political trust and distrust are associated with (a) levels of public compliance across a variety of lockdown measures, and (b) levels of support for lockdown measures among politicians in local authorities.
In and of itself, trust is necessary for democracy. At a practical level, democracy requires a certain delegation of labour in which the majority – with scarce time, resource or knowledge – give agency to elected politicians to pass laws and devise policies in their better interests. This chain of delegation requires continuous trust judgements by principals (i.e. citizens) about agents (i.e. politicians and policy-makers), and in turn the efficacy of those relationships rests on a mutual recognition of such trust (or distrust) among elected representatives.
Political trust assumes added saliency for good governance and political relationships in times of uncertainty. Whether or not existing intelligence related to ‘known unknowns’ like the coronavirus pandemic can be successfully deployed, relies on confident relations between political leaders and those they govern. Focusing on vertical relations between governor and governed, and horizontal relations amongst politicians, I develop these arguments in more detail in the article to suggest that trust and distrust may shape a number of behavioural responses to crises like Covid-19. I test these arguments with survey data gathered synchronously from the UK public and local politicians (i.e. councillors) in April 2020 - shortly after the country entered our first national lockdown.
On one hand, higher rates of public compliance with a range of lockdown measures were found, as expected, among those with the strongest affective trust in MPs (average 10% increase). Affective trust refers to people’s positive emotional ties to representatives and, in particular, hope or faith in their abilities and intentions to change lives for the better. Counter-hypothetically, those most sceptical of MPs were also more likely to comply with a range of lockdown measures (average 5% increase). On reflection, this finding is intuitive when you consider that people whose distrust in politicians is shaped by attentive doubt and suspicion may also be more amenable to public orders underpinned by third party scientific advice. Given that affective trust in politicians has likely diminished since April in line with successive policy failures and U-turns (e.g. on Covid-19, Brexit, A-Level results), it may be that certain types of public distrust in politicians (as above) play a bigger role in securing compliance over Christmas and into the New Year.
Although this research focuses on trust, the data also suggest that a range of socio-economic, demographic and political covariates (including age, ethnicity, education, and Brexit) frame the extent to which people can afford to comply with lockdown orders.
At an elite level, it appears that the Conservative Government was not governing with consensus at the height of the first wave. At a local level, partisan splits among councillors were observed across a host of policy decisions related to the Covid-19 crisis. For example, 81% of Labour councillors 'strongly agreed' with the need for concurrent financial packages for workers and the unemployed alongside lockdown measures, compared to just 51% of Conservatives. In contrast, more than 50% of Conservative councillors ‘strongly agreed’ with an emergency powers act for the sitting government compared to fewer than 15% of both Labour and Liberal Democrat councillors.
Yet controlling for party affiliation, councillors with higher levels of behavioural-intentional political trust (characterised by trust in the institutional power of politicians) were circa 18% more supportive of lockdown measures. Moving forward, these findings suggest that Boris Johnson should invest heavily in building trust at all tiers of government if he wants to get local authorities ‘on-side’ in the rest of this pandemic. Confrontations seen between the Government and Greater Manchester authorities in October indicate that such an approach has not yet been a priority in Number 10.
Whatever happens this Christmas, politicians and their advisors should start to think seriously about the importance of political trust. In the first instance, they can utilise that which is in their control: specifically, the characteristics they demonstrate for citizens (and elected colleagues!) in order to (a) inspire positive trust judgements based on hope, confidence and assurance, which then (b) invite reciprocal trust-based behaviour. At the same time, there may be some merit to governing strategies aimed at either (a) appealing to the instincts and rationality of those with the greatest reservations about politicians (‘the mistrustful’), or even (b) actively encouraging healthy levels of public scrutiny and political attentiveness. The latter may require brave and bold changes to political communication as well as improved school-based education in political literacy.