Crisis Performance, Hegemonic Preferences, and Support for Democracy: Evidence from the COVID-19 Pandemic (With Renu Singh and Jonathan Chu).
International competition between the United States and China politicized the COVID-19 pandemic as both countries sought to sway global opinion by criticizing each other and their democratic or authoritarian governance. Do perceptions of superpower performance during such a crisis affect people’s preferences regarding hegemonic competition and regime type? We answer this question using descriptive and experimental survey data from more than a dozen countries. Our results show that perceptions of performance during the pandemic strongly correlate with preferences for US or Chinese hegemony as well as support for democracy. Furthermore, experimentally priming poor performance by the US government modestly reduces support for US hegemony and weakens confidence in democracy, though symmetric patterns do not occur for China. These findings suggest that government performance during crises can win international favor and shape beliefs about political systems, but perhaps more strongly for the existing hegemon.