When Lockdowns Change Everything: Dynamics of Political Attitudes Among Migrant and Non-Migrant Young Adults in Germany During Covid-19

Political, societal, and economic threats often result in large-scale changes in political trust. While extant research demonstrates many group-specific heterogeneities in these dynamics, less attention has so far been paid to citizens who just entered adult life. Specifically, this study argues that the initial rally effect was less pronounced among young adults due to perceptions of disproportionate affectedness by containment policies, whereas the subsequent decline of trust was exacerbated by feelings of social isolation and loneliness and by the burden of juggling childcare responsibilities with occupational consolidation. Further, it presumes that this trust-depressing effect was stronger among those with a direct migrant background irrespective of structural and socio-economic disadvantages. To put this to the empirical test, this study draws on a diverse cohort of citizens in their mid- to late twenties during the pandemic based on the National Educational Panel Study from Germany with more than 4,000 respondents from 2017 to 2023 and employs individual-level fixed-effects models with different control variables encompassing individual socioeconomic and family situation, subjective pandemic experiences, and psychological factors to account for other factors that might explain trust changes in times of crisis. Preliminary results lend support to the general theoretical argument, but will be extended, e.g., by looking into political efficacy and interest, too. This study contributes to research on crisis-related shifts in political trust by focusing on a group of citizens for whom the pandemic constituted the first major crisis event in their adult life course, thus likely leaving a discernible imprint.