Pandemic control and public evaluation of government performance in Hong Kong

Abstract

The COVID-19 outbreak has presented huge challenges to governments around the world, but it can also be an opportunity for governments to strengthen their performance legitimacy if the pandemic can be controlled. However, the relationship between pandemic control and the public evaluation of government performance might not be straightforward. This essay puts forward a conceptual framework for understanding how a government might or might not benefit from an improvement in a pandemic situation. It distinguishes between retrospective performance evaluation and attitudes toward ongoing preventive measures and highlights the role of responsibility attribution and risk assessment alignment in shaping public opinion. Guided by the framework, this essay discusses the experience of Hong Kong in 2021, where public evaluations of the government remained largely negative despite the lack of serious outbreaks throughout the year.

Keywords:

• Performance legitimacy
• public opinion
• retrospective performance evaluation
• responsibility attribution
• risk assessment alignment
• Hong Kong

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The figures are available at https://www.pori.hk/pop-poll/government/h001.html.

2 PORI was formerly the Public Opinion Program (HKUPOP) at the University of Hong Kong. It was established in 2020 after the head of the POP, Dr. Robert Chung, retired from the university. PORI continued to conduct a range of public opinion surveys that HKUPOP used to conduct, including public confidence about various aspects of Hong Kong society, public evaluation of the government, and other topical surveys.

3 Sample information is available at https://www.pori.hk/penri/ggpi-appendix1.html.

4 The daily number of new cases was square-rooted to reduce the skewness in the variable.

5 A 0–100 scale was used in these surveys.

6 The surveys used a five-point Likert scale ranging from strongly dissatisfied to strongly satisfied for satisfaction with government performance. The value used in the analysis here is net satisfaction, that is, the percentage of respondents satisfied with the government minus the percentage of respondents dissatisfied with the government.

7 In the preliminary analysis, the actual level of prohibition at the time (2 on or before February 23 and 4 on February 24 and after) was also used as a control variable. However, the variable turned out to be unrelated to the dependent variables. Therefore, it is not used in the analysis presented here to retain a more reasonable case-to-variable ratio (especially for the model on satisfaction with government performance).

8 Multicollinearity refers to the intercorrelations among the independent variables in a regression model. Very high levels of multicollinearity can affect the likelihood of discerning significant results and can adversely affect the reliability of regression coefficients.

9 Sample size = 847. The author has access to the raw data for the survey.

10 Sample size = 710. Basic results are available at: http://www.hkiaps.cuhk.edu.hk/wd/ni/20210401-161808_1.pdf.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Francis L. F. Lee

Francis L. F. Lee is a professor at the School of Journalism and Communication, Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is the lead author of Memories of Tiananmen: Politics and Processes of Collective Remembering in Hong Kong (Amsterdam University Press, 2021) and Media and Protest Logics in the Digital Era (Oxford University Press, 2018). He is an elected Fellow of the International Communication Association.