New paper on “Trust and Accountability in Times of Pandemic” by Monica Martinez-Bravo and Carlos Sanz. The paper investigates whether poor public services affect confidence in political institutions. The authors conduct an online experiment during the COVID-19 pandemic where some individuals are informed about the number of contact tracers in their region. Most individuals over-estimated the number of contact tracers. Hence, when they receive the actual number is bad news regarding the quality of their public services. The authors find that the provision of this information reduces trust in governments as well as the COVID-19 vaccine acceptance. The paper also finds that individuals endogenously change their attribution of responsibilities when receiving the treatment. In regions where the regional and central governments are ruled by different parties, sympathizers of the regional incumbent react to the negative news on performance by attributing greater responsibility for it to the central government. The authors call this the blame shifting effect. In those regions, the negative information does not translate into lower voting intentions for the regional incumbent government. These results suggest that the exercise of political accountability may be particularly difficult in settings with high political polarization and where areas of responsibility are not clearly delineated.
