Replication Data for: Die Systemunterstützung in Niedersachsen während der Corona-Pandemie

In this article we analyse system support in Lower Saxony during the Covid-19 pandemic. System support is of great importance for the stability and sustainability of representative democracy, which was repeatedly seen as threatened and in some cases openly questioned, especially in the course of the Corona pandemic. Using data from the Lower Saxony Democracy Monitor (NDM), we examine the extent to which our respondents’ satisfaction with policy outcomes shapes system support. We assume that system support in times of Covid-19, if correlated with policy outcomes, should be strongly shaped by perceptions of Covid-19 measures taken by federal and state governments. We thus consider Covid-19 measures as a special case of policy output orientation. Furthermore, we investigate whether there are differences in the evaluation of federal and state governments and the containment measures they take, and whether these differences affect system support in different ways. As a result, we find mixed evidence for a vote-winner hypothesis. In contrast, our policy feedback hypothesis, which focuses on satisfaction with the Covid-19 measures, finds stronger support in our data. Moreover, AfD voters support the political system to a significantly lesser extent than voters of all other parties and respondents with populist attitudes are less likely to express system support. However, this weaker system support of populists is balanced by satisfaction with the measures taken to contain the Covid-19 pandemic in the case of the Lower Saxony state government—but not in the case of the federal government.