Given the significant chance of another COVID-19-level pandemic in the next 10 years, it is valuable to examine public reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic in its earliest period when we were learning about the nature and epidemiology of the novel SARS-CoV-2 virus and before vaccines and other medical interventions were available. At that time, the common initial governmental response to reduce transmission and infection risk was to limit movement and public gatherings. However, within just a few months, such measures generated popular push back and unrest. In some European Union (EU) nations, right wing groups were rather vocal about lockdowns as damaging to the economy and constraining individual liberty. Yet, other EU nations saw more tolerance to public health measures and greater communitarian sentiment. How might a nation’s political and COVID-19 policy context contribute to such reactions?

Examining 21 EU countries during three time periods of 2020, our study tests hypotheses regarding how trends in citizen-level responses to COVID-19 measures are associated with three elements of national-level political context: support for populist political parties, government trustworthiness, and COVID-19-related policy stringency.

We merge political context data from several sources (e.g., European Parliament, Transparency International, Oxford Coronavirus Government Response Tracker) with respondent-level data from the European Parliament COVID-19 Survey, a repeated cross-sectional survey collected during 2020 (the first year of the pandemic) at three time points (April-May, July, and September-October). Our multivariable analyses focus on three respondent-level outcomes—satisfaction with government pandemic measures, health benefits vs. economic damage of restriction measures, and extent to which limits to individual freedom is justified vs. opposed—while controlling for national- (e.g., COVID-19 burden) and respondent- (e.g., demographic) level confounders.