A global crisis is an extreme disturbance of a social, economic, or environmental system that can cause negative long-term consequences. Unlike most previous related research, our analysis considers the micro-level determinants of people’s reaction to and belief about how their country was handled during a global crisis (e.g., their trust in the institutions tasked with managing the crisis and their subjective well-being).
The most visible global crises occur when a local impact of a global event is disproportionately high relative to other comparable territories. For example, the global financial crisis of 1997–2010 originated in East Asian economies that took advantage of low interest rates to accumulate debt. When those markets began to revert, investors panicked and pulled billions of dollars out of the region, leading to the collapse of several major banks including Lehman Brothers in 2008. Bailouts by governments and central banks averted a worldwide financial meltdown, but it was a painful recession nonetheless.
Today, the global landscape is rife with multiple, interconnected crises. Violent conflicts and forced displacement are increasing across the world, with repercussions for food security and energy markets. The COVID-19 pandemic and increasing climate change are compounding each other to roll back development gains and make achieving the Sustainable Development Goals of ending extreme poverty and promoting shared prosperity more challenging.
Sociopolitical trust literature proposes that the congruence principle predicts that, during a global crisis, people will tend to trust national and international institutions in tandem—that is, as their trust in each increases or decreases, so will their trust in both. This expectation is based on the assumption that, because a global crisis has deterritorialized reach and non-locally specified origins, individuals will rely on institutions with descriptive legitimacy to manage the crisis.