Local Impact of Global Crises, Institutional Trust, and Consumer Well-Being: Evidence from the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Global crises have become increasingly more frequent and consequential. Yet the impact of these crises is unevenly distributed across countries, leading to discrepancies in (inter)national crisis-regulating institutions’ ability to uphold public trust and safeguard their constituents’ well-being. Employing the paradigm of citizens as customers of political institutions, drawing on attribution and sociopolitical trust theories, and using the COVID-19 pandemic as an empirical context, the authors investigate how consumers’ relative perceptions of local impact following a global crisis affect the psychological processes of institutional trust formation and consumer well-being. Conducting one survey-based study in two countries affected disproportionately by the pandemic’s first wave (the United States and Greece) and one experimental study in a third country (Italy) during the pandemic’s second wave, the authors find that institutional trust declines more in countries whose citizens hold perceptions of higher relative local impact following a global crisis; institutional blame attributions explain trust erosion; institutional distrust decreases consumer well-being and adherence to institutional guidelines; consumers’ globalization attitudes immunize international institutions from blame and distrust; and political conservatives transfer blame and distrust from national to international institutions amid global crises. The findings enrich the institutional branding and trust literatures and have implications for stakeholders involved in global crisis management (e.g., policy makers, political marketers, institutional brand managers).