‘We're All in This Together?’ A Survey Experiment on the Perceived Legitimacy of Region-Specific Crisis Interventions in Germany and the Netherlands

Abstract

In responding to crises, governments often need to enact restrictions on the freedoms of citizens that might be perceived as intrusive and unfair. Yet, government interventions need to retain legitimacy in the eyes of citizens. We study the perceived legitimacy of pandemic crisis interventions with a focus on the effects of multi-level governance and region-specific interventions. Such territorially-differentiated measures are often appropriate for effective crisis responses, but they raise concerns about equal treatment. Our pre-registered survey experiments run on quota-representative national samples in Germany and the Netherlands (N = 2252) find no evidence in support of the conjecture that citizens perceive nation-wide crisis interventions as more legitimate than region-specific measures. The level of government making the decision matters very little for the legitimacy of the interventions. Restrictions enacted by the national government are slightly more accepted than those decided regionally in the Netherlands, but there is no such difference in Germany.