Over the course of 2020, different countries all over the world implemented combinations of non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI). This meant that these governments imposed restrictions that were difficult to enforce (due to the scale of the policies) in order to protect public health from the threat of COVID-19. This is an interesting quasi-experimental setting in which to test the compliance with government prescriptions of populations with different political cultures. With the help of European Social Survey data, and the John Hopkins University dataset on the spread of COVID-19 around the world, the present work aims to test the impact in a sample of European countries of different political culture characteristics on the spread of coronavirus, and thus on compliance with NPIs. The results show that countries with higher social capital follow NPIs more strictly, especially if this capital is of the bonding kind. Moreover, both interpersonal trust and trust in institutions play a role. The former has a positive effect, while the effect of the latter depends on the type of institution: trust in government and parliament does not affect citizens’ behavior, while trust in political parties, justice, the police and the healthcare system does.