Replication Data for: Pandemics meet democracy: The footprint of COVID-19 on democratic attitudes

How did the COVID-19 outbreak affect citizens' democratic preferences? Were the changes persistent or temporary? We track a representative sample of Spanish citizens before, during, and after the pandemic, with eight survey waves from January 2020 until January 2024. We compare democratic attitudes before and after the pandemic with individual fixed effects models. We identify a sharp increase in preferences for technical rather than ideological policy-making at the very onset of the pandemic, as well as significant changes in voters' preferences for competent rather than honest politicians. These changes are sudden and persistent over 4 years. Using a set of repeated survey experiments we also document a widespread willingness to sacrifice rights and freedoms to deal with the pandemic as compared to other global threats such as international terrorism and climate change. But this effect quickly faded over time. Overall, we identify significant changes in democratic attitudes during the pandemic and a durable shift in technocratic preferences that outlived the pandemic, setting the conditions for long-term legacies of COVID-19 on democracy.