Liberté, Égalité, Crédibilité: An experimental study of citizens' perceptions of government responses to COVID-19 in eight countries

: During a global pandemic, individual views of government can be linked to citizens' trust and cooperation with government and their propensity to resist state policies or to take action that influences the course of a pandemic. This article explores citizens' assessments of government responses to COVID-19 as a function of policy substance (restrictions on civil liberties), information about performance, and socioeconomic inequity in outcomes. We conducted a survey experiment and analyzed data on over 7000 respondents from eight democratic countries. We find that across countries, citizens are less favorable toward COVID-19 policies that are more restrictive of civil liberties. Additionally, citizens' views of government performance are significantly influenced by objective performance information from reputable sources and information on the disproportionate impacts of COVID-19 on low-income groups. This study reinforces the importance of policy design and outcomes and the consideration of multiple public values in the implementation of public policies

A Comparative Study of Gender Representation and Social Outcomes: The Effect of Political and Bureaucratic Representation

This article examines whether gender representation of government leadership in the legislative and executive branches improves social equity related to women\u27s social outcomes and how this effect is moderated by the status of democracy. Using a panel data set on 135 OECD and non‐OECD countries from 2005 to 2015, the analysis shows that in non‐OECD countries, political gender representation has a significant, positive impact on female educational attainment and overall gender equality, while bureaucratic gender representation is significant for educational attainment only. For OECD countries, political representation has a consistent effect on educational attainment, labor force participation, and overall gender equality, but there is no evidence of bureaucratic representation. Democratization plays a more critical role in shaping the relationship between institutional representation and women\u27s social outcomes in non‐OECD countries than their OECD counterparts, where gender equality is attributable to broader social, economic, and cultural factors