Jakob Frateur
The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that political actors and were willing to take or endorse drastic measures to mitigate the spread of the virus. At the same time, the political systems responding to the pandemic have become increasingly interconnected into multilevel governance structures. Also, studies have shown that political trust is seen as an important precondition for the functioning of a political system, especially in times of crisis, while the drivers of political trust are less often studied. The concept of political trust is also relevant from an MLG perspective, as different tiers of government (in)directly influence citizens’ trust and as citizens can express trust in different levels simultaneously. However, the effect of both contexts on political trust is rarely studied. This paper therefore examines how crises mitigating measures and multilevel governance contexts impact political trust. We study this question by means of a systematic literature review of 48 papers searched for in political science or legal research. The goal of this research is to systematize and integrate knowledge of distinct strands of research, searching for overlaps, in order to get more insight in the phenomenon of political trust.
