Trust in Institutions and Crisis Preparedness Across Urban–Rural Sweden

Contemporary crisis management increasingly shifts responsibility for preparedness from the state to citizens, expecting households to maintain emergency supplies and plans with limited public support (Rådestad & Larsson, 2020). In Sweden, authorities now recommend households be self-sufficient for at least one week. Yet citizens respond unevenly, raising questions about what drives variation in preparedness and whether policies that assume uniform civic capacity risk deepening existing inequalities. This paper examines how different forms of trust shape individual crisis preparedness across urban and rural Sweden. Using original survey data (N≈13,000), we distinguish interpersonal trust and institutional trust in crisis-relevant authorities at national and local levels. Preparedness is measured along two dimensions: active preparedness (e.g., stockpiling supplies, making emergency plans) and perceived resilience (self-assessed capacity to cope with disruptions in electricity, water, and food access). The results show a clear pattern. Interpersonal trust is not significantly related to either preparedness dimension. By contrast, institutional trust in crisis-relevant authorities—especially the government, defense forces, municipal administration, and local emergency services—is strongly and positively associated with active preparedness. Citizens who trust these institutions report substantially higher levels of concrete preparation. However, institutional trust is unrelated to perceived resilience, indicating that subjective capacity and behavioral action likely operate through different mechanisms. These findings challenge common assumptions about social capital in crisis response. Preparedness appears to depend less on horizontal networks than on vertical relationships with responsible institutions and the perceived legitimacy of their guidance. This has governance implications for rural and peripheral areas where service consolidation and administrative centralization may erode local government trust (Erlingsson et al., 2023; Wallman Lundåsen, 2024), producing “double vulnerability”: fewer services and weaker capacity to compensate through self-reliance. The paper theorizes how responsibilization strategies may reproduce inequality when the trust that enables compliance varies systematically across place and social position.