Crises, Trust, and Political Legitimacy

Abstract

This panel investigates how crises shape political trust, legitimacy, and citizens’ perceptions of governance performance. Bringing together research on institutional trust, generational dynamics, socio-economic stress, vulnerability, and crisis framing, the panel moves beyond elite-centred accounts of crisis management to foreground how citizens experience, interpret, and evaluate crisis responses. Empirically, the contributions cover economic, health, energy, and migration-related crises and employ a range of methods, including large-scale survey analysis, cohort analysis, qualitative interviews, and mixed-method designs. The papers show how trust conditions preparedness and compliance; how they affect different social groups unevenly, and how, even highly salient, crisis events may fail to generate lasting political consequences. Taken together, the panel demonstrates that trust and legitimacy during crises are fragile and contested, shaped by policy design choices, communication and embedded inequalities.

Title	Details
From Energy Shock to Trust Shock: Crisis Management and Political Trust in the European Union	View Paper Details
Navigating Vulnerability: Structural Inequalities and Lived Experience During the Covid-19 Pandemic in Stockholm	View Paper Details
Trust in Institutions and Crisis Preparedness Across Urban–Rural Sweden	View Paper Details
Political Trust in Times of Crises: a Cohort Analysis of 25 EU Countries from 2005-2024	View Paper Details
A Tragedy With(out) Consequences: the Political Effect of the Messenia Migrant Boat Disaster	View Paper Details