Dofile Study: Affectedness, partisanship and evaluations of containment measures:The formation of political trust during the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic triggered ‘rally around the flag’ effects in various countries across Europe. There has been little research examining the relative relevance of political trust determinants in relation to different phases of the pandemic. This article aims to explore what role conventional determinants, objective affectedness and perceptions of containment measures played in explaining levels of political trust in Germany over the course of the pandemic. By employing OLS and FE regressions in a three-wave panel survey, I find that party identifications and evaluation of containment measures played decisive roles, while experienced income losses did not robustly shape political trust between 2020 and 2021. The trend analysis indicates that threat perceptions of the impact of containment measures on German society – but not on individuals – increasingly eroded trust in politics across various subgroups of respondents as the partisan trust gap narrowed over time.