Pandemic activism in comparative perspective: exploring the roles of populist attitudes, direct online political sources, and misinformation

Managing the COVID-19 pandemic required governments to act quickly with little input from legislatures, civil society, and citizens. This crisis created a critical opportunity for populists to fuel distrust in media, government, and science. Using digital media, they and other political leaders can communicate directly with citizens through websites and social media accounts. Furthermore, misinformation on social media circulating during the pandemic created further opportunities to generate support for populist ideas and motivate collective action in reaction to public health measures. This paper examines the roles of populist attitudes, direct online political sources, misinformation, and pandemic activism using a survey conducted in January and February 2023 in Germany, Canada, the UK, the US, and France. We find that perceived exposure to misinformation, self-assessed ability to detect misinformation, and sharing of misinformation positively correlate with populist attitudes and pandemic activism. Sharing misinformation relates to pandemic activism in all five countries and all ideological groups. Consuming direct online sources of information from candidates and parties, such as on websites and social media, is weakly related to populist attitudes but highly correlated with pandemic activism. Specifically, visiting candidates’ or parties’ websites significantly correlates with pandemic activism; this relationship is significant in all countries and ideological groups. Finally, we find a weak relationship between holding populist attitudes and participating in pandemic activism; this relationship is only significant in Canada, France, and Germany. We offer important insights into cross-national differences in pandemic activism. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of misinformation-motivated activism.