Questions on Public Policy and Trust during Covid-19 in the Middle East and North Africa

Trust is a recurring theme in social-science literature for disciplines as diverse as psychology, political science, anthropology, sociology, and management. Recently, the concept has even been studied in neurobiology, behavioral economics, and computer science. In discussing the impact of state responses to Covid-19 on trust in government, one should distinguish between two types of trust: political and social. Political trust refers to the extent to which people have trust in institutions; social trust refers to trust in other people within the community and beyond. While some studies suggest that political and social trust tend to correlate with each other, most studies examine these concepts separately. This article focuses on the impact of Covid-19 on trust in government in the Middle East: political trust in the context of the pandemic.