Policy Revisions During Crisis: The Impact on Voter Trust in Government

Recent literature has explored the impact of policy reversals on citizens’ attitudes towards the government, mostly finding negative effects. We contribute to research exploring whether scientifically supported policy updates from apolitical public authorities can mitigate negative backlash. Drawing on an information experiment conducted among 10,500 citizens in Germany, we find that inconsistent advice adversely affects perceived credibility and competence of the government and that prior trust does not influence this effect. Exposing citizens to information about the scientific process and the normalcy of changing recommendations yields a positive but insignificant effect. In a second analysis, we study the implications of this for policymaking. We analyze public health policy changes in the context of the Covid-19 crisis across 65 countries and find that incumbents who face electoral pressure indeed change their recommendations less often. Taken together, the results suggest that governments in democracies face a difficult-to-resolve trade-off between electoral support and public welfare once new, inconsistent evidence becomes available.