Local Administrations in Times of Crisis: Enhancing Trust Through Good Crisis Management?

With the effects of the 2015/16 migration crisis still being felt today in many affected states, questions about administrative crisis management and its societal impact loom large. In Germany, the bulk of crisis management capacities lies with the local community-level administrations, where officials are expected to respond fast and effectively. However, under crisis conditions, administrations must prioritize actions under high uncertainty. Associated trade-offs are well established in the literature, such as between effective crisis response and legitimacy-enhancing features of governance. But little is known about the societal effects of administrative action that navigates such dilemmas. In this study, we contribute to a better understanding of what exactly is perceived as good administrative crisis management by the population. We test the effects of variation in administrative action—focusing on trade-offs between crisis responses that emphasize effectiveness, accountability, distributional equity, and procedural fairness—and how such choices are perceived by publics. This way, we want to examine under which conditions crisis management is perceived as legitimate and can enhance trust in local administrative structures. We apply a vignette experiment that was part of a German-wide representative population survey to test what types of responses are perceived as most legitimate by the population in the context of the 2015/16 refugee crisis.