August 6, 2020

expert reaction to non-peer reviewed survey about the Cummings effect and its impact on public confidence in government

A correspondence piece, published by the Lancet, discussed the “The Cummings Effect” and its impact on public confidence in government.

Dr Nilu Ahmed, Lecturer in Social Sciences at the University of Bristol, said:

“This study shows a significant drop in confidence in the Government following Dominic Cummings’ breach of Government guidelines to limit the spread of coronavirus and protect the NHS. Whilst there was already an obvious downward trend in how much people trusted this Government’s handling of the virus, we can clearly see a sharp fall following Boris Johnson’s lack of condemning Mr Cummings’ trip. At a time when across the population people were making serious sacrifices and unable to see loved ones, even tragically missing funerals, the Prime Minister’s support of the breaking of the rules by his unelected advisor, might have felt like a deep betrayal to the electorate.   

“The anger at Boris Johnson specifically is seen in the fact that people in Scotland and Wales did not express the same level of loss of confidence in leadership of their own countries. In fact, the evidence suggests that Mr Johnson’s decision not only seriously decreased trust in his premiership, but increased confidence in the devolved leadership. This has implications for the growing calls for greater devolution and Independence for Scotland and Wales from England.”  

Prof Richard Harris, Professor of Quantitative Social Geography at the University of Bristol, said:

“Containing the spread of a contagious and often fatal disease requires everyone to listen to and to follow the best scientific advice. Whatever the rights or wrongs of Cummings’ behaviour, those in positions of authority have to set the best example or else the already rampant cynicism against politics and politicians is amplified. The result is that public trust is eroded as this study very clearly shows.”

Prof Robert Dingwall, Professor of Sociology, Nottingham Trent University, said:

“This is a large panel study. Although the panel is not strictly representative of the UK population, the size and weighting processes described should give us a high degree of confidence in the results, even at the level of the various nations.

“The shift in ‘trust in government’ for England is striking, although it may be too narrow to describe it as uniquely a ‘Cummings Effect’. There had been previous breaches of the rules by other public figures and it may be that the media treatment of the Cummings trip pulled these together as the culmination of a pattern of behaviour rather than as an isolated incident.

“It is not clear that the forced resignation of the CMO for Scotland had the same impact, for example, partly because there was decisive action and partly because it was clearly a one-off. The lack of sanctions on Cummings may have contributed to the perception that there was one law for them and one for the rest of us, which had already been exposed by the lockdown measures.

“We had seen, and still see, a lot of patrician policy-making, where rules are made by white men who live in big houses with big gardens and imposed on a diverse society without much regard to the problems that they cause for other groups. Trust was already lower in England and this may have been a ‘last straw’ rather than a decisive moment in its own right.”

‘The Cummings effect: politics, trust, and behaviours during the COVID-19 pandemic’ by Daisy Fancourt, Andrew Steptoe and Liam Wright was published as a correspondence article in The Lancet on Thursday 6 August 2020, 23.30 UK time.

All our previous output on this subject can be seen at this weblink:

www.sciencemediacentre.org/tag/covid-19

Declared interests

None received.