Replication Data for: Political Trust and Government Performance in the Time of COVID-19

Governments around the world have exhibited markedly different levels of effectiveness in handling the COVID-19 pandemic, and these variations have not been adequately explained by conventional correlates of good governance. This paper advances a co-production perspective, arguing that citizens’ predisposition to support and comply with government policies has played a crucial role in shaping countries’ pandemic performance. Analyzing a cross-country dataset that combines COVID-related cases and deaths with a new measure of political trust constructed from multiple international surveys, we show that the numbers of casualties from the pandemic are significantly lower in societies where citizens have greater trust in their governments. This relationship continues to hold even when we focus only on wealthy, democratic countries. Additional analyses suggest that higher political trust contributes to both better compliance with mitigation measures by citizens and more decisive decision-making by policymakers. These findings underscore the importance of citizen—government collaboration for effective governance and the perils of declining political trust in advanced democracies.