'Good' citizens in 'exceptional' times

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

This session of the Political Behaviour Colloquium features a presentation by Riccardo Di Leo (Research Fellow, EUI).

Numerous scholars have identified history’s persistent, time-varying impact on current political attitudes. We study how perceived state and regime legitimacy may impact citizens’ willingness to rally around the flag in times of crisis. We exploit the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic as a life-threatening shock that suddenly increased the "visibility" of the state and prompted a - counter-intuitive - "technocratic" response among citizens, who were urged to follow the experts' advice by their elected leaders. We use an original, representative panel survey fielded in Spain right before the outburst of COVID-19 to test whether the pandemic spurred conflictual reactions in areas where the democratic regime was perceived as less legitimate. We find evidence of a lower technocratic response during the early stages of the pandemic in areas less hostile to Francoism. This finding is corroborated by historical contextual proxies for state legitimacy from the late-XIX and early-XX centuries.

The Zoom link will be sent upon registration. If you would like to receive the paper, please contact PoliticalBehaviour.Colloquium@eui.eu.