Democracy Institute, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary.
Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark.
PLoS One. 2023 Aug 17;18(8):e0288644. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0288644. eCollection 2023.
While the World was busy mitigating the disastrous health and economic effects of the novel coronavirus, a less direct, but not less concerning peril has largely remained unexplored: the COVID-19 crisis may have disrupted some of the most fundamental social and political relationships in democratic societies. We interviewed samples resembling the national population of Denmark, Hungary, Italy and the US three times: in April, June and December of 2020 (14K observations). We show that multiple (but not all) measures of support for the political system decreased between April and December. Exploiting the panel setup, we demonstrate that within-respondent increases in indicators of pandemic fatigue (specifically, the perceived subjective burden of the pandemic and feelings of anomie) correspond to decreases in system support and increases in extreme anti-systemic attitudes. At the same time, we find no systematic trends in feelings of social solidarity, which are largely unaffected by changes in pandemic burden.
当世界忙于减轻新型冠状病毒带来的灾难性健康和经济影响时，一种影响不那么直接但同样令人担忧的危险在很大程度上仍未被探索：新冠疫情危机可能已经打乱了民主社会中一些最基本的社会和政治关系。我们对丹麦、匈牙利、意大利和美国四个国家的人群进行了三次类似全国性的抽样调查：2020 年 4 月、6 月和 12 月（共 14K 次观察）。我们发现，2020 年 4 月至 12 月期间，多项（但非全部）支持政治体系的措施有所下降。利用面板设置，我们证明了大流行疲劳指标（具体而言，即对大流行的主观负担感和失范感）在受访者内的增加与对系统支持的降低以及对极端反体系态度的增加相对应。与此同时，我们发现社会团结感没有系统的趋势，它基本上不受大流行负担变化的影响。
