Crises, Coordination Failures, and Centralizing Shifts: Comparative Public Opinion Evidence from the COVID-19 Pandemic

Centralization represents the historical response of political elites to overcome the difficulties in coordination when facing up to an external threat. Yet we know little on the demand-side of authority distribution in the context of a crisis. In this paper we develop a theoretical model on the effect of crises and coordination inefficiencies on individuals’ territorial preferences. We predict that crisis time uncoordinated responses will prompt a centralizing shift in preferences. We test this argument using online survey experiments in a comparative sample of 13 countries at different times of the COVID-19 pandemic. Results show that exposure to unsuccessful intergovernmental coordination shifted individuals’ preferences towards a more centralized power allocation in a majority of countries. This effect is moderated by contextual conditions such as actual multilevel policy efforts and changes in the intensity of the pandemic. Individual-level territorial identity or partisan identification also intervene as significant moderators of our treatment.