Sceptical Trust: Legitimacy Under Non‐Coercive Crisis Governance

ABSTRACT Crisis governance increasingly relies on recommendations rather than enforcement, raising a question scholarship has not fully addressed: how is legitimacy sustained when compliance cannot be required? Existing accounts emphasise institutional trust as the key resource. Drawing on Pippa Norris's concept of sceptical trust, this paper identifies and empirically operationalises this pattern—institutional confidence coexisting with critical evaluation of specific measures—in the context of non‐coercive crisis governance and argues that legitimacy under such regimes cannot be reduced to trust alone. The empirical setting is the Faroe Islands, a self‐governing archipelago that managed COVID‐19 almost entirely through recommendations and civic cooperation, with low mortality and high reported satisfaction with the response. The case provides analytical purchase because trust–legitimacy mechanisms should work here if anywhere: institutional trust is high, outcomes are good, and the response was unusually non‐coercive even by Nordic standards. Drawing on a retrospective survey conducted 14 months after the pandemic ended, the analysis applies Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and linear regression to eight trust and reasonableness items. Three findings stand out. First, institutional trust and perceived reasonableness of measures were closely associated, particularly among older respondents and those with higher interpersonal trust. Second, a secondary dimension captured the sceptical trust pattern, exhibited by approximately 28% of respondents. Third, Faroese respondents rated all surveyed measures less favourably than the Nordic comparison mean despite reporting high overall satisfaction with the response. Regression analyses indicate an asymmetry between the two dimensions: overall legitimacy was strongly predicted by judgements of proportionality, interpersonal trust, and age, whereas sceptical trust was largely unexplained by the demographic and attitudinal variables in the analysis. Under non‐coercive crisis governance, legitimacy appears not simply to be drawn from a stock of accumulated institutional trust but also produced through citizens' continuing evaluations of specific measures. Trust is a necessary but insufficient condition for legitimacy under such regimes.