The Unexpected Effect of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Authoritarian and Populist Attitudes – A Natural Experiment in the Netherlands

The recent events related to COVID-19 pandemic were complex and all-encompassing, having as such the potential to affect political attitudes of citizens in at least 2 ways: via the salience of health risks associated with the pandemic and via widely implemented lockdown policies. Although undesirable, the events that transpired inspired an entire research movement that studies the effects of the pandemic on political outcomes. As the pandemic occurred during a longitudinal research into the relationships between work and politics conducted in the Netherlands, it created the conditions for a natural experiment design – two waves of data collection including a wide range of demographic and attitudinal variables were conducted before, and one after the pandemic onset (2017, 2018 and 2020). Following the known connection of fear and authoritarianism and the “rallying around the flag” hypothesis which states that times of crises incite trust in the government as an authority, we would expect that peoples’ attitudes become more authoritarian following the pandemic onset. Similarly, following the findings of rootedness of populism in cultural and economic anxieties, we would expect a rise in populist attitudes. However, the fixed effects panel analysis shows that both authoritarian and populist attitudes significantly decreased in the observed sample (N=4855) upon pandemic onset. Theoretical explanations based on socio-psychological mechanisms are discussed that help explain these findings