The effect of populist attitudes on the perception of the Covid19 pandemic and policies to contain it.

The Covid19 pandemic has had a major impact on everyday life, where people feel affected both economically and health-wise by the spread of the novel virus regardless of whether they have contracted it or not. At the same time, we know that populist attitudes influence how people perceive their individual situation, the political environment and available policy solution. Are these two factors interrelated? This article examines the role that populist attitudes play (a) in subjective feelings of being affected by the Covid19 pandemic and (b) in the choice of policies to counteract it. Populist attitudes may lead people to reject the policy-making process during the Covid19 pandemic, which has been shaped primarily by expert opinion. The article argues that this should increase the sense of concern of the group of people with populist orientations and lead to a rejection of commonly discussed policies to contain the virus. In order to empirically test this connection, a representative survey was conducted in Austria in September 2020. The statistical analysis of its results shows a significant and effective correlation between populist attitudes and the subjective feeling of being affected by the current crisis in the areas of both health and the economy. Similarly, we find evidence that populist attitudes affect the acceptability of policies to combat the spread of Covid19. These findings indicate that populist attitudes have such strong effects on individuals’ perception of the world that they even influence the perception of the globally shared challenge of a pandemic.