We study how Swedish citizen updated their institutional and interpersonal trust as the corona crisis evolved from an initial phase to an acute phase in the spring of 2020. The study is based on a large web-survey panel with adult Swedes (n = 11,406) in which the same individuals were asked the same set of questions at two different time points during the coronavirus pandemic (t0 and t1). The sample was self-selected but diverse (a smaller subsample, n = 1,464, was pre-stratified to be representative of the Swedish population on key demographics). We find support for that the corona crisis led to higher levels of institutional and interpersonal trust. We find no support for a polarization effect, according to which low-trusting citizens responded more negatively to the deepening crisis than high trusting citizens did.
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Esaiasson et al. (2020) studied this question.