Liberté, Égalité, Crédibilité: An experimental study of citizens' perceptions of government responses to COVID-19 in eight countries.

During a global pandemic, individual views of government can be linked to citizens' trust and cooperation with government and their propensity to resist state policies or to take action that influences the course of a pandemic. This article explores citizens' assessments of government responses to COVID-19 as a function of policy substance (restrictions on civil liberties), information about performance, and socioeconomic inequity in outcomes. We conducted a survey experiment and analyzed data on over 7000 respondents from eight democratic countries.