Public trust, policing, and the COVID-19 pandemic: Evidence from an electoral authoritarian regime.

ABSTRACT: We examine how trust shapes compliance with public health restrictions during the COVID- 19 pandemic in Uganda. We use an endorsement experiment embedded in a mobile phone survey to show that messages from government officials generate more support for public health restrictions than messages from religious authorities, traditional leaders, or international NGOs. We further show that compliance with these restrictions is strongly positively correlated with trust in government, but only weakly correlated with trust in local authorities or other citizens. We use measures of trust from both before and during the pandemic to rule out the possibility that trust is a function of the pandemic itself. The relationship between trust and compliance is especially strong for the Ministry of Health and

SUBMITTER: Blair RA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9122739 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature