The global crisis peaked in 2008 with the failure of US financial firm Lehman Brothers, triggering panic in financial markets and sending economies into recession. Millions lost their jobs, homes and large sums of their wealth. Policy responses prevented a worldwide depression and saved the world economy from the worst slowdown since WWII. But the crisis left lasting damage to many countries’ competitiveness and prosperity and prompted people to question whether international institutions should intervene to manage global crises in the future.
As negative events with severe well-being consequences, global crises motivate causal judgments about whether the crisis could be controlled or prevented by those responsible to govern it (Tomlinson and Mayer 2009). Controllability judgments determine the blame that people assign to crisis-regulating institutions. Since global crises require interventions at the national and the international level, people also evaluate the competence of both local and supranational institutions to manage these events.
We explore these dynamics by leveraging the marketing paradigm of citizens as customers of national and international institutional entities and drawing on psychological theories of attribution and blame, sociopolitical theories of institutional trust and governance, and well-being research. Our hypothesis is that perceptions of high relative local impact following a global crisis elicit causal attributions that transfer blame from national to international institutions, and these attributions reduce the perceived legitimacy of both national and international institutions in the eyes of citizens. We further propose that marketers can help restore institutional trust and adherence to global crisis guidelines by promoting consumers’ dispositions toward globalization as a positive force in society, which entails both greater acceptance of the role of the international community in managing crises and greater propensity to follow international institutions’ guidance during crises.