Influencing factors of satisfaction with COVID-19 response in Portugal: an exploratory study

Since 2020, governments around the world have been designing and implementing rapid responses to the pandemic, which are of great significance to the improvement of citizens’ satisfaction with COVID-19 response. In this effort, they are faced with some corruption risks which may undermine the effectiveness of responses. Indeed, breaches of anticorruption standards, including surcharges, speculation, collusion, cutting corners in procurement processes, and even politicians taking advantage of the crisis to increase their private benefits, have been recorded in various countries during the COVID-19 pandemic, including Europe. Based on a mass survey from Portugal, collected during the peak of the third wave (December/January 2021) and at the end of the third wave (April/May 2021), in this study the influencing factors of citizens’ satisfaction with COVID-19 pandemic response were analyzed with regression strategy. The results reveal that the data fit the model well, and all the hypotheses formulated in this study were supported. Among the factors that were found to directly affect citizens’ satisfaction with pandemic response (SPR) in Portugal, tolerance towards corruption in exceptional contexts (TtC-COVID) has positive impact on satisfaction, followed by political trust and lockdown break. The political orientation and the pandemic fatigue have negative impact on SPR. The sociodemographic variables that have significant impacts on the latent variables were also explored. Regarding the main findings, citizens who were more tolerant towards corruption tended to have higher satisfaction with COVID-19 response. Moreover, the improvement of PT was found to significantly increase SPR. Finally, citizens more right political-oriented were found to have lower SPR. According to the results, implications for the prevention and control practices during pandemic crisis are proposed.