The best COVID-19 buster? Trust.
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Ned Temko Correspondent
| London
It is clear that some countries have done a lot better than others when it comes to dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, limiting infection rates and the number of lives lost. But two studies just published come to a surprising conclusion: Success has depended less on things like health care infrastructure or type of government, than it has on an intangible – trust.
Nations with high levels of trust among citizens, and especially of trust in government, have done best, the studies find.
Why We Wrote This
It turns out that trust is the most powerful tool at a government’s disposal when it comes to successfully limiting the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
That’s good news for them, but not so good for countries where trust in government is low, such as the United States and Britain. As British and U.S. authorities end restrictions, they will be trying to convince their citizens that mandates might be going away but the coronavirus isn’t, so people need to behave carefully.
That will take credible leadership, where credibility is in short supply.
But there are signs of hope. The government in Taiwan, where trust was near rock bottom only a few years ago, has rebuilt it with deliberate efforts. And more broadly, interpersonal trust has proved more resilient than trust in government. That may be a good place to start strengthening society’s confidence.
It’s still much too early to say the COVID-19 pandemic is over. But it’s not too early to look for lessons from the successes – and failures – that governments around the globe experienced as they tried to meet its challenge.
And it’s becoming ever clearer that a key factor distinguishing those who’ve succeeded from those who failed is a single, five-letter word: trust.
Communal trust is part of it – how individuals and communities connect with, and care for, one another. But what has turned out to matter even more is the trust – or lack of it – that citizens have in their own governments.
Why We Wrote This
It turns out that trust is the most powerful tool at a government’s disposal when it comes to successfully limiting the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Governments that have managed to limit the number of COVID-19 cases, and of lives lost – ranging from democracies like New Zealand and Denmark to Communist-ruled Vietnam – tend to score highly on the trust barometer.
But even there, trust in government has been eroding as the pandemic trundles on. And the problem is magnified in places where trust in government was already low, such as the United States and Britain, which have suffered more heavily from the pandemic.
They are now loosening restrictions and seeking to balance the economic and social benefits of “opening up” with widespread public acceptance of some continuing precautions so as to create a sustainable “new normal.”
Governments will be seeking to drive home the message that mandated restrictions might be going away, but the coronavirus isn’t, so citizens should behave carefully. The question is whether those citizens will trust the messengers enough to follow their advice.
And the issue of trust in government – how to keep it if it’s there, rebuild it if it’s not – will also have wider implications when it comes to securing consensus around other national challenges, or international ones such as climate change.
Since the pandemic began, the significance of trust in government has been clear. It has been a recurring theme of this column, singling out not just New Zealand but other early success stories, like the island democracy of Taiwan.
But two major studies in recent weeks have dramatically underscored its importance.
The larger one, led by Thomas Bollyky, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Erin Hulland of the University of Washington, drew on polling data from 177 countries, placed alongside the numbers of infections and lives lost in each country.
It found that previously assumed factors influencing “pandemic preparedness,” such as the nature of a country’s government or its health care infrastructure, paled beside “trust.”
The other study was by Alexander Bor and two colleagues at Denmark’s Aarhus University and surveyed Denmark, Hungary, Italy, and the United States. It explicitly focused on trust – both the trust people extend to one another, and trust in government.
And while it found that interpersonal trust had proved remarkably resilient during the pandemic, the state of trust in government was less encouraging. It had “markedly decreased” in all four countries.
That poses an important short-term challenge. Last week, one of the Aarhus report’s co-authors, Michael Bang Petersen, warned in The New York Times that even though “public trust has taken a hit,” it was now imperative for governments to provide “strong leadership” and bring people together in a “shared view” of the kind of choices and precautions most likely to bring the pandemic to an end.
But a number of democracies, including the U.S., face a tougher, longer-term difficulty: How to rebuild trust in government where it had been badly battered long before the pandemic.
The Pew Research Center’s measure of trust in the U.S. federal government has charted a steep decline since the late 1950s, when roughly three-quarters of Americans said they trusted Washington to do the right thing. Now, fewer than one-quarter say the government will do what is right “most of the time.” Just 2% say it will do so “just about always.”
A similar trend has been evident in Britain since a 1944 Gallup Poll found about one-third of respondents believed their parliamentary representatives were merely “out for themselves.” Now nearly two-thirds feel that’s true. Only 5% say their politicians are focused on the national good.
So how can trust in government be repaired? Is that even a realistic goal?
There are two reasons why it may yet prove possible.
The first is that there’s at least one recent precedent, highlighted in a fascinating commentary by Asia specialist Rorry Daniels for the Brookings Institution. It’s Taiwan, where until a few years before the pandemic, trust in government had been near rock bottom.
After winning elections in 2016, President Tsai Ing-wen moved actively to rebuild trust. She appointed a technology expert who led a transformative project to use digital communication to open up government, communicate directly with citizens across partisan divides, and build consensus on key policies. And it has worked, making a big contribution to Taiwan’s early pandemic success.
And there may be another, broader model. It’s suggested by the Danish academics’ survey finding that people-to-people trust has managed to weather the pressures of the pandemic in a way that trust in government has not.
It will take time. It will surely prove difficult.
But maybe it’s part of the answer – to rebuild trust from the foundation-stone up.
