Authoritarian Legacies or Government Policies? Trust Dynamics and Regime Socialisation in Times of Crisis

Literature on crisis policymaking often assumes that government measures shape political trust. At the same time, we lack comprehensive evidence on how deep-seated regime socialisa-tion experiences affect crisis-related trust dynamics. We draw on Germany’s historical East-West divide and examine how changes in political trust during the Covid-19 pandemic relate to both regime socialisation and regional containment policies. Socialist socialisation should trigger a stronger initial rally-around-the-flag effect and a more pronounced decline of trust during later stages of stricter containment policies, with heterogenous effects according to the duration of regime socialisation. Using five waves of individual-level panel data (N=23,420, 2017-2023) and fixed-effects models with district-level infection rates and various policy re-strictions, we find a shared rally effect across East and West. Comparable trust declines in the second year were explained by regional containment policies. However, by the third year, in-stitutional trust in the East eroded further – without clear links to containment policies. Media trust, already lower in the East, revealed a growing divide as well. Finally, changes in trust varied by length of Socialist regime exposure. In the context of an extended crisis, our find-ings point to the limited capacity of crisis policy to explain trust dynamics when considering deep-seated socialisation.