Uncooperative Society, Uncooperative Politics or Both? How Trust, Polarization and Populism Explain Excess Mortality for COVID-19 across European regions

Abstract

Why have some territories performed better than others in the fight against COVID-19? This paper uses a novel dataset on excess mortality, trust and political polarization for 153 European regions to explore the role of social and political divisions in the remarkable regional differences in excess mortality during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. First, we argue that it is not only levels, but also variations in trust among citizens – in particular, between government supporters and non-supporters – what matters for understanding why people in some regions have adopted more pro-healthy behaviour. Second, we hypothesize that the ideological positioning and polarization of such positioning among political parties is also linked to higher mortality, for it facilitates taking government measures aimed at satisfying core constituencies (e.g. business interests) to the detriment of building wide political consensus to undertake unpopular yet necessary measures. Overall, we find that mass polarization also played a significant role. When the divide in political trust between supporters and opponents of incumbent governments within societies is high, we observe consistently higher COVID-19-related excess mortality deaths during the first wave of the pandemic. We also find that regions with a political elite less supportive of European integration are regions where excess deaths have been significantly higher.