Coronavirus and the future of trust and populism

The recent 2020 Edelman Trust Barometer revealed a dramatic turnaround in levels of popular trust in governments, from their lowest to highest ever recorded levels. Indeed, government is now the institution most people trust, for the first time in the survey’s 20-year history.

How brittle is this new found faith in those who govern us? Will it outlive the peak of the

global coronavirus pandemic or will it decline as our societies return to relative normality? Could populism and distrust of ‘elites’ return with a vengeance later on?

Our Pocket Dilemma presenters, Jonathan Charles and Kerrie Law, were joined on Zoom by:

Barry Eichengreen, George C. Pardee and Helen N. Pardee Professor of Economics and Political Science at UC Berkeley, California, US, author of The Populist Temptation: Economic Grievance and Political Reaction in the Modern Era;

Sergei Guriev, our former Chief Economist, who teaches a course on populism at Sciences Po, Paris, France; He is a co-author of the recent survey “Political Economy of Populism” and the leader of the Research and Policy Network on Populism at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) and a moderator of VoxEU’s debate page on populism;

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