ÌÇÐÄvlog¹ÙÍø

Crises of the magnitude of the COVID-19 pandemic may plausibly affect deep-seated attitudes of a large fraction ofcitizens. In particular, outcome-oriented theories imply that leaders’performance in response to such adverse eventsshapes people’s views about the government and about democracy. To assess these causal linkages empirically, we use apreregistered survey experiment covering 12 countries and 22,500 respondents during the pandemic. Our designenables us to leverage exogenous variation in evaluations of policies and leaders with an instrumental variables strategy.Wefind that people use information on both health and economic performance when evaluating the government. Inturn, dissatisfaction with the government decreases satisfaction with how democracy works, but it does not increasesupport for nondemocratic alternatives. The results suggest that comparatively bad government performance mainlyspurs internal critiques of democracy.