Social trust during the pandemic: Longitudinal evidence from three waves of the Swiss household panel study

In this study, I analyse whether and why people’s social trust, the belief that most people can be trusted, changed during the COVID-19 pandemic in Switzerland. My analysis is guided by two different approaches to potential dynamics in social trust, (1) the settled disposition model which advocates for stability within individuals over time, and (2) the active updating model claiming that crisis-induced experiences may leave a lasting scar on people’s trust. Using nationally representative longitudinal data from the Swiss Household Panel and comparing patterns of change before, during and after the outbreak of the pandemic, I found that an exceptionally large share of respondents displayed a decline in social trust in spring 2020. However, in most cases, trust quickly recovered to pre-crisis levels shortly afterwards, thus strengthening the hypothesis that people’s social trust tends to fluctuate around a certain set point. Among a range of potential individual-level determinants for the short-lived drop in social trust, only attitudes towards the government’s handling of the crisis stick out as significant drivers of change.