The global crisis encompasses a variety of events that affect multiple regions simultaneously, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a financial slowdown, soaring food, energy and supply chain insecurity, escalating natural and climate-related disasters and inflation. They create interconnected threats to global development, eroding well-being gains and jeopardizing effective short-term response and resilient risk management strategies.
As global crises have deterritorialized reach, they motivate people to form causal attributions of blame based on their beliefs about whether the crisis could be controlled or prevented by crisis-regulating institutions. Sociopolitical trust literature offers two opposing principles regarding these attributions. The congruence principle argues that trust in national and international institutions goes hand-in-hand, whereas the dissonance principle proposes that distrust in one is offset by trust in the other.
In this article, we build on these theoretical frameworks to identify polarization in people’s reactions to a global crisis and how they relate to their views about globalization’s desirability. We find that conservative antiglobalists perceive international institutions as competitive trust referents, transfer blame for crisis grievances from national to international institutions and have the highest distrust in both national and international institutions. In contrast, conservative globalists perceive international institutions as collaborative trust referents and do not blame them for a global crisis, retain institutional trust in both national and international institutions and promote adherence to both local and global crisis-prevention guidance.
Our findings have important implications for international marketing scholarship because they demonstrate the value of understanding contextual differences in how individuals view global and local marketplace concepts (e.g., brands, firms). They also contribute to a growing body of knowledge on the interaction between local and global processes, such as consumption patterns, organizational relationships and business environments.