Trust in Times of Crisis: A Survey Experiment of Volunteers’ Trust in Local Government

The German migration crisis of 2015/16 triggered a substantial wave of solidarity and voluntary engagement. Over the course of the crisis, an estimated fifty percent of the German population was engaged in some sort of volunteerism for refugees, twenty-five percent actively. For many observers this implied a renaissance of civil society and the beginning of a new division of responsibilities between the state, economic and private actors. However, not all local administrations had the capacities and necessary strategies to coordinate the increasing numbers of volunteers. Furthermore, they faced organizational dilemmas associated with crisis management and clashes in the behavioral logics of bureaucracies and civil society. In this difficult context of crisis, the interaction with overburdened local administration could possibly have negative impacts for the levels of trust and legitimacy that citizen volunteers put in the capacities of local institutions. Hence, the aim of this paper is to investigate the question how local administrative behaviour interacts with volunteers’ trust and expectations. Combining public administration literature on governance dilemmas in crisis with sociological theories on trust and legitimacy of citizens in institutions, a democracy-enhancing context for voluntary engagement is scrutinized. Methodologically, this paper relies on data from a survey experiment studying attitudes and perceptions of approximately 1.050 respondents who volunteered during the migration crisis 2015/16 in Germany.