Trusting communication of the pandemic: the perceptions of Spanish citizens regarding government information on Covid-19

Resumen

There is global concern regarding how the Covid-19 pandemic was communicated to citizens, given the enormous amount of uncertainty and misinformation surrounding the health situation (Singh et al., 2020). As expected, the government has been the main source of official information in most countries, but the crisis has also affected political communication models and the management of crisis communication and misinformation. In this scenario, the level of trust in the government and political polarization have become crucial variables to understand how citizens perceive and receive communicate about the effects of the pandemic in their daily life. To address these issues in the case of Spain, in November 2020 we conducted the first nationally representative survey to analyze the level of trust that citizens have in public information on Covid-19 provided by the national government. The findings reveal that their perceptions regarding the quality of such information, the media used for its transmission, and the communication management by the Government during the pandemic were rather negative, although some sociodemographic differences are observed. This study, besides broadening knowledge about government communication during the pandemic in Spain, opens new questions such as the effect of trust in government communication on the level of compliance and agreement with health measures.