The effects of stress on political leadership evaluations

Stress is a response to external environmental conditions that encourages individuals to pursue changes in their lives. We examine the relationship between stress and federal and provincial political leaders’ approval ratings. We theorize that, as a strategy to cope with the pandemic stresses outside of their direct control, individuals will redirect their frustrations toward incumbents. We hypothesize that greater experiences with stress will negatively correlate with the approval of political incumbents even among members of incumbents’ political in-group. We analyze data from the COVID-19 Monitor survey, a multi-wave, cross-sectional survey of over 56,000 Canadians. On three out of four measures, we find that stress negatively impacted incumbent approval, and that these negative impacts occur among the incumbent’s supporters and non-supporters. On the fourth measure, we find the effect of stress on approval is moderated, positive or negative, by whether regional leaders took action to limit the spread of coronavirus disease 2019.