Analyzing the factors affecting the attitude of public toward lockdown, institutional trust, and civic engagement activities.

Abstract

The early 2020 witnessed Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic followed by a nationwide lockdown in the whole history for the first time. The entire world had to go for nationwide lockdown to curb the spread of such contagious and deadly disease. In short, the coronavirus outbreak and the subsequent lockdown had created a storm in the world giving rise to change in public with respect to parameters like trust in the government institutions, civic engagement, and so on. In this raising dilemma, multiple countries have acknowledged the significance of trusting institutions, especially during lockdown. It is also widely accepted that lives of individuals had been undergoing change ever since the spread of COVID-19. Likewise, public's trust in the institutions is directly related to the civic engagement. Civic engagement is commonly understood as a phenomenon that develops a difference in an individual's civic life by combining values, skills, motivation, as well as knowledge. Different forms of civic engagement include national service, volunteering, societal services, and so forth. The main focus of this article is to examine the influence of COVID-19 outbreak on general attitude of the citizens of Malaysia and India, their trust on the governing institutions, and the civic engagement. In other words, this study tries to assess the impact of the pandemic on variables such as attitude toward the lockdown, trust in institutions, and civic engagement. For this, the study adopted cross-sectional community questionnaire survey in two countries-Malaysia and India. The respondents selected for the study was 1437. The respondent's demographics, attitude toward lockdown, trust in institutions, and civic engagement during the lockdown were collected by means of convenience sampling technique. Later the collected data were measured in terms of descriptive statistics and regression analysis. Findings of the study stated that public's trust in the institution can be increased by enhancing the civic activities and implementing policies that govern and build the society.