Koren Ore, Weidmann Nils B
Department of Political Science, Tobias Center for International Development, Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Analysis, Indiana University Bloomington, Bloomington, IN 47405.
Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Konstanz, Konstanz 78457, Germany.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2025 Jul 22;122(29):e2506093122. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2506093122. Epub 2025 Jul 17.
The COVID-19 pandemic has renewed attention to the far-reaching social implications of emerging infectious diseases, an issue with historical parallels in the transformative effects of the Black Plague and Spanish Flu. However, the potential for epidemics to reshape political trust and fuel instability has remained underexplored. This study leverages a novel dataset on zoonotic disease outbreaks-including Ebola, Marburg, H1N1, and the Black Plague-and geolocated Afrobarometer survey data from dozens of African states to investigate whether exposure to these deadly outbreaks alters public confidence in political institutions. Estimating the average-treatment-effect-in-the-treated with coarsened exact matching, we find that individuals with an infectious disease outbreak experience significant declines in trust toward the political establishment, especially the president, parliament, and ruling party (reductions of 0.2, 0.18, and 0.22 points, respectively, on a four-point scale). These findings, consistent across various spatial and temporal windows, provide robust empirical evidence that deadly infectious disease outbreaks can exacerbate political polarization and undermine political stability. The study emphasizes the critical need for policy strategies that integrate public health preparedness with efforts to preserve and rebuild institutional trust during outbreaks.
新冠疫情再次引发了人们对新发传染病深远社会影响的关注，这一问题在黑死病和西班牙流感的变革性影响方面有着历史的相似之处。然而，疫情重塑政治信任并加剧不稳定的可能性仍未得到充分探索。本研究利用了一个关于人畜共患病疫情的新数据集——包括埃博拉、马尔堡、H1N1和黑死病——以及来自数十个非洲国家的地理定位的非洲晴雨表调查数据，以调查接触这些致命疫情是否会改变公众对政治机构的信心。通过使用粗化精确匹配估计处理组中的平均处理效应，我们发现有传染病疫情经历的个人对政治体制，特别是总统、议会和执政党的信任显著下降（在四分制量表上分别下降0.2、0.18和0.22分）。这些在不同时空窗口都一致的发现，提供了有力的实证证据，证明致命传染病疫情会加剧政治两极分化并破坏政治稳定。该研究强调了政策策略的迫切需求，即在疫情期间将公共卫生准备与维护和重建机构信任的努力结合起来。
