Crises, Responses, and the Public Legitimacy of International Organizations

Crises compel international organizations (IOs) to make consequential decisions under intense public scrutiny. Yet most research on IO legitimacy focuses on routine, non-crisis conditions. In an ongoing crisis, citizens cannot evaluate outcomes that have not yet materialized and instead assess an IO’s legitimacy based on its observable response strategies. This paper asks which crisis response strategies citizens perceive as legitimate and how these evaluations are shaped by procedural and political context. We examine these questions through a vignette survey experiment on the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Germany, South Korea, and Türkiye.