The world faces multiple global crises, including environmental degradation, climate change, rising food and energy prices, political instability, economic slowdown, growing inequality, declining social cohesion, increasing migration, wars in several places and unsustainable debt. These have significant implications for the well-being of citizens and require joint efforts by the international community, based on its core values of peace, human rights, justice, and economic progress.
The 2008 global financial crisis was caused by the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September and the subsequent failure or near-collapse of a large number of other financial firms (Wu and Gupta 2015; Guiso and Guiso 2020). In response, governments implemented stimulus spending to stimulate economic activity, guaranteed deposits and bank bonds, and purchased ownership stakes in some banks and other firms to restore confidence in financial markets. These actions prevented a global depression, but also slowed global economies and left millions of people without work or with lower incomes.
A key finding from our research is that people’s reactions to the management of a global crisis vary depending on their fundamental views about the desirability of globalization. Conservative globalists use national institutions as competitive trust referents and transfer blame for crisis grievances to the state, whereas liberal globalists view both national and international institutions as collaborative trust referents and tend to trust international organizations more than national ones.
Our results suggest that a better understanding of the dynamics of institutional blame, trust and well-being is needed in global crisis management. Future research should investigate how people’s perceptions of the legitimacy of different guidelines formulated by local and supranational authorities evolve over time in response to changing crises contexts, as well as how they affect intentions to follow those guidances under socially uncertain conditions (e.g., in the case of a divergence between global and local COVID-19 pandemic guidelines).