Most US And UK Citizens Not Satisfied With Their Government's COVID-19 Response, Survey Shows

A survey across 14 countries around the world has found that most citizens feel that their governments responded well to the COVID-19 pandemic, except the Americans and Britons. The U.S. and the U.K. are at the bottom of the list, suggesting that their citizens are mostly not satisfied with how their governments handled the pandemic.

The Pew Research Center released the poll on Thursday after surveying 14 advanced economies in North America, Europe, and Asia. The poll involved interviewing 14,276 adults from the countries by telephone from June 10 to Aug. 3.

The survey found that the majority of Americans and Britons believe that their leaders did not do a good job responding to the coronavirus. Fifty-two percent of Americans and 54 percent of Britons have a bad impression of their respective government’s response to the pandemic.

The U.S. and the U.K.’s low satisfaction percentages are well below the 73 percent satisfaction percentages of Denmark, Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, South Korea, Italy, and Sweden. More than half of the citizens surveyed in France, Belgium, Japan, and Spain also look favorably on the job done by their governments responding to COVID-19.

The survey also found that in the U.S., most Americans do not think that they are more united now than they were before the pandemic. Only fewer than two in every 10 U.S. citizens say that their country is more united now, a full 21 percentage points below the next lowest-ranking countries, Germany and France, where around four in every 10 citizens have the same opinion.

There is also a huge gap between Republican and Democratic views of whether or not they are pleased with Donald Trump’s COVID-19 response. Around 75 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents believe that the U.S. government has done a good job dealing with the pandemic, while only about 25 percent of Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents say so.

According to top U.K. polling expert John Curtice, the result of the survey is well understood by social scientists. “Generally speaking, it doesn’t matter what you’re asking: the government in power is more likely to be seen well by people who voted for it than people who didn’t,” he said.