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Abstract The past few years have seen an emergence of populist leaders around the world, who have not only accrued but also maintained support despite rampant criticism, governance failures, and the ongoing COVID pandemic. The Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte is the best illustration of this trend, with approval ratings rarely dipping below 80 percent. What explains his high levels of robust public support? We argue that Duterte is an ethnopopulist who uses ethnic appeals in combination with insider vs. outsider rhetoric to garner and maintain public support. Moreover, we argue that ethnic affiliation is a main driver of support for Duterte, and more important than alternative factors such as age, education, gender, or urban vs. rural divides. We provide evidence of Duterte's marriage of ethnic and populist appeals, then evaluate whether ethnicity predicts support for Duterte, using 15 rounds of nationally representative public opinion data. Identifying with a non-Tagalog ethnicity (like Duterte) leads to an 8 percent increase in approval for Duterte, significantly larger than any other explanatory factor. Among Duterte supporters, a non-Tagalog ethnicity is associated with 19 percent increase in strong versus mild support. Ethnicity is the only positive and significant result, suggesting that it strongly explains why Duterte's support remains robust. Alternative explanations, such as social desirability bias and alternative policy considerations, do not explain our results. 

In principle, aid from donor organizations to developing countries should be based on need and the likelihood of positive impact, but political biases may intrude into decisions about aid allocations. This article elaborates a theory about why a particular form of bias, one based on partisan affiliations, can affect where aid goes and whether the goals of aid are met. Party networks can facilitate coordination of decisions and leverage bureaucratic capacity, but they can also ensure that resources, such as aid, stay in the control of copartisans to boost reelection goals. The empirical analysis evaluates whether partisan bias is evident in the locations and impact of World Bank agricultural aid to India. The authors analyze georeferenced data on aid projects, election results, and cropland coverage at the levels of state parliamentary electoral constituencies and administrative districts from 1995 to 2008. They find that alignment between local legislators and the political parties that govern state and national governments is associated with a greater number of new aid projects and with anomalous changes in cropland coverage. The evidence is consistent with arguments that partisan bias works primarily through patronage to achieve strategic party goals. 

What influences the adoption of SARS-CoV-2 mitigation behaviors–both personal, such as mask wearing and frequent handwashing, and social, such as avoiding large gatherings and physical contact–across countries? Understanding why some individuals are more willing to change their behavior to mitigate the spread of a pandemic will not only help us to address the current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic but also to respond to future ones. Researchers have pointed to a variety of factors that may influence individual adoption of personal and social mitigation behaviors, including social inequality, risk perception, personality traits, and government policies. While not denying the importance of these factors, we argue that the role of trust and confidence has received insufficient attention to date. Our study explores whether there is a difference in the way trust and confidence in particular leaders and organizations affect individual compliance and whether this effect is consistent across different types of mitigation behaviors. Specifically, we utilize an original cross-national survey conducted during the first wave of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic (May-June 2020) to investigate how trust in scientists, medical professionals, politicians, and religious leaders and confidence in global, national, and local health organizations affects individual compliance in 16 countries/territories across five world regions. Our analyses, which control for the aforementioned factors as well as several others, suggest that trust in politicians and confidence in national health ministries have the most consistent influence on whether individuals adopt both personal and social mitigation behaviors. Across our sample, we find that greater trust in politicians is associated with lower levels of individual compliance with public health directives, whereas greater confidence in the national health ministry is associated with higher levels of individual compliance. Our findings suggest the need to understand trust and confidence as among the most important individual level characteristics driving compliance when developing and delivering messaging about the adoption of mitigation behaviors. The content of the message, it seems, will be most effective when citizens across countries trust its source. Trusted sources, such as politicians and the national health ministry, should thus consider working closely together when determining and communicating recommended health behaviors to avoid contradicting one another. 

The Trump administration sought to erode confidence in the international system, which it regarded as an affront to national sovereignty. The COVID-19 pandemic, by raising collective awareness of the need for global cooperation, may help to restore that confidence and encourage renewed commitment to multilateralism. Public opinion polls show that people around the world have greater confidence in global institutions like the World Health Organization than in national leaders like Donald Trump or Xi Jinping. The United States will continue to be an indispensable partner after Trump, but the international order will rest on a stronger footing if Washington is no longer expected to be the prime mover and contributes instead as one among equals. 

Objectives: An effective vaccine to SARS-CoV-2 cannot be successfully deployed if a significant number of people worldwide are unwilling to accept it. We investigated the relationship between trust in scientists and medical professionals and perceptions of vaccine safety and effectiveness. We also build on past studies by exploring the relationship between confidence in global health organizations and vaccine hesitancy. Methods: We conducted an online survey in seventeen countries/territories across five world regions between May -June 2020. We assessed the relationship between COVID19 vaccine hesitancy, confidence in public health organizations, and trust in key experts and leaders. Results: Our findings strongly suggest that confidence in the World Health Organization combined with trust in domestic scientists and healthcare professionals is a strong driver of vaccine acceptance across multiple countries/territories. Conclusion: We find that hesitancy is widespread, and uptake would be insufficient to achieve herd immunity. There is widespread confidence in how public health organizations have responded to the current pandemic and this is related to vaccine acceptance. Our results also highlight the important role of trust in health care providers and scientists in reducing COVID19 vaccine hesitancy.