The coronavirus pandemic now dominates public thinking in nearly every country in the world. Today GQR continues a
series of papers that summarize and analyze all publicly available opinion data worldwide. This issue includes a
particular focus on how job approval ratings for public leaders’ handling of COVID-19 relates to their overall job
approval ratings and their projected vote share. This series has reviewed over 120 opinion polls from 45 countries and
territories so far. We invite readers to alert us to any polling data not captured here. Future installments in this
series will go into more depth about other public opinion dynamics regarding the pandemic.
Top insights from this paper:Concern about contracting the virus continues to rise in most places, often not fully correlating with known in-country
infection rates.Publics in many places are giving national leaders higher marks for their handling of COVID-19 than for their job
performance overall.Despite the comparatively high approval ratings for handling the pandemic, early polling in several countries suggests
only slight gains for leaders’ likely vote outcomes in their next elections.The pandemic is affecting the work of the polling industry, like all other businesses; we offer some observations about
how it is affecting research modes and reliability of opinion research findings.
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