Analysis of how trust and policy stringency determine behavioral response to COVID-19

Abstract

Restrictions and regulations became the reality for most Europeans during the COVID-19 pandemic. Governments handled the pandemic differently and would need their population to follow the instructions sent out to handle the pandemic. This paper supposes that trust is a key to get the population to follow regulations even if the regulations are strict or to just live as before the pandemic. By running regressions for countries with high and low trust among twenty-two European countries and using stringency level and trust as dependent variables to see if this can explain change in time spent at resident and total number of covid-19 vaccinations. With this trying to identify a negative reaction in countries with low trust. The most interesting case would be the group with high stringency level and low trust. Using behavioral mechanisms, the negative reaction was confirmed for countries with low trust and high stringency.