Populist government support and frontline workers' self-efficacy during crisis

Frontline workers who are confronted with crises need enormous resilience and the ability to deal with stress from crisis-related increases in demands and risks. Simultaneously, populist governments with an illiberal agenda may undermine the work of street-level bureaucracies for political reasons. Little is known about how deconstruction of the administrative state by populist government-through lacking government support when it is needed the most-affects frontline work. Thus, this article asks: how does lacking support by a populist government affect frontline workers' self-efficacy when they face a crisis? Based on unique data from an online survey of 3229 Brazilian frontline workers during the early COVID-19 pandemic, when the Bolsonaro government denied the existence of the pandemic, we test the relationship between government support, demands, and resources on frontline workers' perceived self-efficacy. Results show that lacking government support from the federal and local government are negatively associated with frontline workers' self-efficacy. At the same time, resources and managerial support exhibit positive associations-but they cannot always compensate for a lack of government assistance.