NSF Award
2116484
This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2. This project examines four major types of crises -- economic, security, natural disaster, and public health crises – and how they influence public support for political leaders in contemporary democracies. This is important to understand because leader approval is a key barometer of policymaker accountability and democratic stability, both of which can be undermined by crises. This project analyzes the interplay of four factors which vary systematically across these different types of crises and how, in turn, these shape public evaluations of political executives: (1) the ability of citizens to assign responsibility for policy decisions and outcomes; (2) the degree of expert consensus on effective policy response; (3) how much a given crisis in one area generates acute challenges or crises in other areas; and (4) the extent to which an effective response depends on citizens acting collectively. Several data sets including (quarterly) measures of executive approval and crises; the tone and salience of leader messaging about the crises; the media’s treatment of leader messaging; and (monthly) leader approval for a smaller number of countries for which such data is available; and survey-based experiments in three countries are collected and made publicly available. The award supports education and diversity by building the research capacity of a student project lab at Georgia State University, a Minority Serving Institution, in coordination with PIs at four other universities who will also engage graduate and undergraduate students in this work. <br/><br/>Puzzling divergences across countries in public reactions to leader responses to the COVID-19 public health crisis have revealed major gaps in our understanding of how crisis events translate into public assessments of leaders. To resolve these puzzles, this project advances a unifying theoretical framework that identifies four major types of crises: economic, security, natural disaster, and public health. It then locates these crises on four key dimensions which should condition public support of top officials: the institutional and political context and other factors that impact attribution of responsibility, degree of expert consensus and incentives for politicians to follow expert recommendations, the likelihood and nature of spill-over to other crisis types, and the degree to which citizen action is required for an effective response. The project collects data to test theoretically-motivated hypotheses using: 1) a macro time-series cross-national data set to study the effects of crisis type on public approval for political executives for 48 countries, 2) a high-frequency time-series data set appropriate to test how approval dynamics reflect leader responses, as well as messaging choices and media effects for 18 countries for which this data is available, and 3) conjoint experiments in France, Italy, and Mexico, countries with different political and institutional settings, to assess the validity of the links between crisis types and dimensions as well as to validate proposed individual-level mechanisms.<br/><br/>This project is supported by the Accountable Institutions and Behavior Program and the SBE Build and Broaden Program.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
