Politics After the Pandemic: Attitudes to Democracy, Authoritarianism, Protest and the "Culture War" Across Six Countries

The COVID-19 pandemic tested democratic societies in ways that extended far beyond public health. Lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and emergency governance measures became flashpoints for deeper conflicts over trust, authority, and national identity. As the immediate crisis receded, questions remained: How do citizens across the Atlantic world now view democracy and its alternatives? What divides have the pandemic years entrenched or revealed? This report presents findings from a comparative survey conducted in six countries[1] — Brazil, Croatia, Germany, Poland, the United Kingdom, and the United States — at the end of 2024 and beginning of 2025. Drawing on stratified samples in each country, we examine attitudes toward democracy and governance, political interest and mobilization, and positions on contentious “culture war” issues including immigration, ethnic diversity, and sexual harassment. Throughout, we explore how these attitudes vary not only between countries but within them — particularly across those who hold different views about COVID-19 vaccination. Democratic Attitudes: Widespread Support, Uneven Depth Across all six countries, large majorities affirm that living in a democracy is important. Yet the depth of this commitment varies. In Germany, Poland, Brazil, and the UK, roughly half or more of respondents describe democracy as “absolutely important.” Croatia is a striking outlier: only about a quarter of Croatians select consider it an imperative, and more than three-quarters view technocratic rule by experts favorably. Satisfaction with “actually existing” democracy is more equivocal. Germans and Britons express the highest satisfaction, while Brazilians are notably polarized — among the most likely to call democracy “absolutely important” but also the most likely to describe it as a “very bad” system. Brazil also shows the greatest openness to authoritarian alternatives: roughly half of Brazilian respondents view a “strong leader” who ignores congress and elections favorably, compared to a third or fewer elsewhere. Vaccine Attitudes as a Political Marker One of the report’s most consistent findings is that attitudes toward COVID-19 vaccination track with a wide range of other political orientations. Respondents who believe the risks of vaccination outweigh the benefits are, across most countries, less satisfied with democracy, more open to authoritarian leadership, more hostile to ethnic diversity, and more likely to feel that attention to sexual harassment has “gone too far.” This pattern is especially pronounced in the United States, where vaccine skepticism appears tightly bundled with a broader constellation of conservative views. In the UK, by contrast, vaccine skeptics diverge less sharply from the mainstream on other political questions — suggesting that the American pattern of pandemic polarization may be distinctive rather than universal. Mobilization: Interest Without Action Political interest remains relatively high across the six countries. Germany leads in engagement, with more than 40% of German’s describing themselves as “very interested.” Yet interest does not straightforwardly translate into mobilization. Nearly half of British and American respondents say they would “never” attend a lawful demonstration — the highest rates of protest aversion in the study — despite robust traditions of political mobilization in both countries. In Brazil and Croatia, respondents living in neighborhoods marked by visible social disorder (proxied by public alcohol consumption) were more likely to have protested and were more willing to do so again. Elsewhere, the pattern was reversed: neighborhood deprivation was associated with withdrawal from political participation. This suggests that the relationship between local conditions and civic engagement is shaped by national context. The “Culture Wars” Attitudes toward ethnic diversity and sexual harassment reveal both cross-national variation and within-country divides. Americans were by far the most favorable toward increasing ethnic diversity, while Croatians and Poles were the most hostile. On sexual harassment, Brazilians, Croatians, Germans, and Poles were more likely to feel that attention to the issue had “not gone far enough,” while Americans and British respondents were more divided. In the United States, Germany, and to a lesser extent the UK and Poland, positions on these issues cluster together: those who view ethnic diversity positively also tend to feel more attention to harassment is needed, and vice versa. This alignment fits the “culture war” framing familiar from Western political discourse. But in Brazil and Croatia, these attitudes operate more independently — suggesting that the bundling of cultural positions observed in North America and Western Europe does not generalize to all national contexts. Implications These findings offer a mixed picture of democratic resilience in the post-pandemic moment. On one hand, outright rejection of democracy remains rare, and political interest is broadly sustained. On the other hand, pockets of authoritarian sympathy exist in every country surveyed, and the pandemic appears to have crystallized — or at least made visible — attitudinal divides that extend well beyond public health. Vaccine skepticism, in particular, has become a marker of broader worldview orientations, especially in the United States. Whether these divides will fade as the pandemic recedes, or harden into durable political cleavages, remains an open question [1] This survey was funded in six countries by their respective national science agencies: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft-Germany (DFG, Grant nr. 495747738); National Science Centre Poland (UMO-2021/03/Y/HS6/00167), the Economic and Social Research Council, (ESRC-UK, Grant nr. ES/X000788/1); Croatian Science Foundation (Grant nr. 090-18-04/22-18-03/01); FAPESP - Brazil (Grant nr. 2021/07839-2), and the United States National Science Foundation (NSF, Grant nr. NSF-SBE/SMA #2219400) under the Trans-Atlantic Platform RRR Call 2021, project “ENDURE: Inequalities and social resilience and new governance in a post-pandemic world”.