And they come in a statistically common last place with the British over whether their country has handled the pandemic properly, the poll finds.
In the United States, less than two in 10 people (18%) said the country is now more united.
This is a full 21 percentage points among the next lowest countries, Germany and France, where just under four in 10 (39%) respondents expressed that opinion. Denmark had the highest percentage saying its country was now more united, with more than seven in 10 (72%) responding.
As with so many questions these hyperparty days, there is a gigantic gap between Republican and Democratic views on whether the Trump administration has handled the pandemic properly.
Three-quarters (76%) of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said the government has done a good job. But one-quarter (25%) of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents agree.
The findings come from a study by Pew Research Center of 14 advanced economies in North America, Europe and Asia. The Washington, DC-based think tank interviewed 14,276 adults by telephone from June 10 to August 3.
Role of politics
A clear majority of people in the 14 countries said their own nation had treated Covid-19 well: 73% voted in favor, while 27% disagreed.
But in the United Kingdom and the United States, the figures were much lower: 46% and 47% respectively. They are the only two countries where a minority of people said the government had done well. In all other countries surveyed, most people said their government had done well, from Japan with 55% to Denmark with 95%.
The United States is not the only country where support for the government’s coronavirus response has broken down on partisan lines – the Pew survey revealed the same pattern in the United Kingdom and in Spain.
Those results show that it is not a matter of whether you are left or right of the political spectrum that foresees whether you think your government has done well. The US and the United Kingdom have right-leaning governments, while Spain has a left-leaning government. In every country, people with the same political inclination as the government tend to say that it has done well in the crisis.
John Curtice, one of Britain’s leading polling experts, said the phenomenon was well understood by social scientists.
“In general, it does not matter what you ask: the government in power will more often be seen well by people who have voted for it than people who have not done so,” said Curtice, a professor at the University of Strathclyde. in Glasgow.
But he pointed out that the findings make it possible to compare how well each government is doing among its own supporters.
In Spain and the United States, about three-quarters of government supporters say their country has treated the coronavirus well – but in the United Kingdom, that figure is just over half.
Pew Research Center research association Kat Devlin pointed out that not all countries surveyed had a political split over perceptions of the government’s response, “especially in countries with high levels of general satisfaction about how their nation has dealt with the COVID. 19 outbreak. “
“In Denmark, currently led by the center-left Social Democrats, and in Australia, whose leader Scott Morrison belongs to the center-right Liberal Party of Australia, at least nine-in-ten adults believe in both the political left and the left. “Politically right their country has done well against the coronavirus,” Devlin, one of the reporters, told CNN in an email.
Economic confidence is also linked to the belief that the government is doing well. In all 14 countries surveyed, people who said the current economic situation was good were more likely to say the government was doing a good job on coronavirus.
Again, the US is the most extreme example of the trend: There is a 44-point gap between those who say the current economic situation is bad, but the government is handling the crisis well (34%) and those who saying that the economic situation is good and the government is handling the crisis well (78%).
Life changes
One potentially surprising area where the United States falls short in the middle of the package is over the question of whether more international cooperation would have reduced the number of cases of coronavirus in their country. In the entire survey of 14 countries, 59% of people said it would, while 36% said it would not. In the United States, 58% said more cooperation between countries would have helped and 37% said it would not.
Among other findings in the survey, women in each country are more likely than men to say that their lives have changed because of the crisis, with a gap as high as 15 points in the United States, France and Sweden.
And perhaps most surprising of all, in Sweden – which famously placed almost no restrictions on stopping the spread of the virus – more than seven out of 10 people (71%) said that their lives had changed a lot as a result of the outbreak. That is the one to one highest percentage of each country in the survey, behind South Korea (81%), which places severe restrictions.
The Pew Research Center has conducted nationally representative telephone surveys of adults in the United States, Canada, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, and South Korea.
The study was conducted only in countries where nationally representative telephone surveys are feasible.
“Due to the outbreak of coronavirus, face-to-face interviews are currently not possible in many parts of the world that we have previously included in our research,” said co-author report, Devlin. “Since 2016, we have surveyed almost every year in 12 of these nations, and they represent some of the largest economies in the world and traditional allies of the US.”
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