Rally Effect in the Covid-19 Pandemic: The Role of Affectedness, Fear, and Partisanship

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit internationally in March 2020, governments and political incumbents received exceptionally high approval ratings. Such a sudden spike of public support times crisis is often explained as ‘rally ‘round flag’ effect. This paper has three goals: first, to examine whether rally effect indeed occurred; second, analyse how much it related (i) affectedness, i.e. occurrence infections on individual aggregate level, (ii) fear Covid-19; third, an assumed moderating partisanship. We merged survey data from online conducted September 2020 part German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES) with infection rates state level (Bundesländer) published by Robert Koch Institute. detect striking all partisan camps. Furthermore, we identify driving mechanism while there no evidence that affectedness major force behind show partisanship takes role for regarding satisfaction government.