Search volumes from an internet search engine as a tool to evaluate the levels and drivers of South African public’s interest in exceptional situations and accountability

The COVID19 pandemic unfolded in a complex environment and understanding the situation was a crucial part of the pandemic response in South Africa. This should have led to the interest of the South African public in accountability/corruption, crisis, emergency, and disaster during pandemic as an exceptional situation. A software tool, namely a Google-linked plugin, was used in this study to assess the relevant trends and to obtain an idea about the qualitative drivers in the increasing interest. The interest in ‘crisis’ during the 2004-2022, as well as during the COVID19 pandemic, can be considered low and also does not exhibit a clear relationship with time. The South African public’s interest in ‘emergency’ as a keyword was driven by a combination of everyday concerns and the interest in the state of emergency. The level of relative interest in emergency could be considered low to medium, in comparison to other search terms South Africans searched for using Google. There seems to be an increasing interest in the ‘disaster’ search term increased on the relative scale after the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. However, significance of this term remained low relative to other search terms on Google in South Africa during the COVID19 pandemic. Decrease in the political stability and the (perceived) rise of violence in South Africa increased the South Africa population’s interest in accountability and corruption. However, the relevant index accounted for only 29.6 % of variability in the public interest in the accountability and corruption in South Africa. Interest in ‘emergency’ increased with decreasing political stability and the (perceived) rise of violence in South Africa. The same trend was observed for the regulatory quality of governance and government effectiveness indices. That conclusion is supported by the second power of the relevant Spearman correlation coefficients ranged from 51.73 to 77.9 %.