Does The Public Rally Behind Leaders Who Contract Covid-19?

When a president or prime minister falls ill, public reaction varies along a wide spectrum, from panic to indifference. We sought to determine how the Covid-19 pandemic has fared in that regard, via an in-depth look on how contracting the virus impacted the approval ratings of different incumbent executives. We chose 5 leaders, all from differing nations with differing social and political climates.

Our research methods consisted of analysis of the net approval (approval minus disapproval) of five incumbent executives who contracted the novel coronavirus. For data, we used weekly estimates from the Executive Approval Project and public health outputs from Our World in Data. We find that personal leadership rallies — a bump in popularity after a positive Covid-19 diagnosis — are, at best, modest. Factors that might explain this common outcome fall short, as they vary across our cases. We originally theorized that the degree to which an executive engaged in populist rhetoric impacted the public’s response to their illness; however, variation in our data negated that assumption. We encountered the same result when measuring the level of political polarization present in the nations of each respective leader. The wide variation of data made it unreasonable to use these measurements as accurate explanatory factors for popularity rallies or lack thereof. 

We conclude that weak rises in popularity for incumbent executives who contract Covid-19 are the most common public response.