During crises, governments must justify extraordinary measures to maintain democratic legitimacy and public support, yet evidence on whether justifications affect public opinion remains limited. This paper studies this question by focusing on a particularly controversial and politicized case: the introduction and subsequent lifting of national border controls within the European Union in response to an increase or decrease in migration. In a pre-registered survey experiment (N=9,115) in Germany, France, and the Netherlands, we examined the impact of government justifications on public support. Building on analysis of German government communications (2013–2023), we manipulated justification aims (security, economic, administrative), process justifications (legal, effectiveness, solidarity), and individual cost information (cost, no cost). Overall, we found high baseline support for border controls. While providing a process justification increases political attitudes such as the perceived legitimacy of the policy and trust in the government actor, the differences between justification types are limited. We did not find an overall positive effect of providing a justification aim. Overall, treatment effects were largely homogeneous across subgroups. Instead, citizens were found to be most sensitive to the individual, practical costs of border controls, such as waiting times at the border and shortages of goods. This questions assumptions about political persuasion in polarized contexts. Concrete policy implications are more relevant than justificatory rhetoric once minimal procedural thresholds are met.

The European Union (EU) currently faces substantial challenges, including rising nationalist sentiments and contentious debates surrounding migration and intra-EU border controls. Despite open borders being celebrated as a key achievement of European integration, public support for reinstating border controls remains high. This paradox underscores the importance of examining how citizens define European identity and determine who belongs within this community. Our study moves beyond traditional categorisations of identity (exclusive national versus inclusive European) by investigating both individual self-identifications and the nuanced traits, values, and behaviors citizens associate with Europeanness. Employing an innovative mixed-methods approach, we analyze qualitative, open-text responses through latent semantic scaling (LSS), capturing identity dimensions that transcend the conventional civic-ethnic dichotomy. Comparative cross-national analysis in Germany, France, and the Netherlands further reveals how distinct political cultures and migration histories shape the meaning of European identity. By integrating self-identification with detailed explorations of identity content, we illuminate how identity influences public attitudes toward migration policies and intra-European border controls. This comprehensive approach contributes valuable insights to policymakers, enriches debates on European integration, and deepens our understanding of belonging and identity in an increasingly interconnected yet contested Europe.

Political trust reflects citizens’ evaluations of political actors, which is in part shaped by direct policy experience. Border closures during the COVID-19 pandemic offer an unusually salient policy encounter: they made state authority visible, interrupted routines, and also signalled who is protected and who is excluded. But the same measure may carry a different political meaning depending on its directionality, namely, whether one’s own government or a neighbouring state restricts entry. In this study, I argue that it is mainly the direction of a border closure that shapes how citizens interpret state action and update political trust. While one’s own government closing the borders can signal protection and control, the same action imposed by a neighbouring state may signal exclusion and loss of standing. Taking advantage of the geographically uneven and directionally asymmetric implementation of border controls across Germany’s nine international borders, I combine a three-wave panel survey of German residents (autumn 2020 to summer 2021) with residential proximity to affected borders. Results from change-score and two-way fixed effects models show that exposure to external-only closures, where neighbouring states restricted entry from Germany without German reciprocation, is indeed associated with a substantial and persistent decline in political trust. By contrast, exposure to closures initiated or reciprocated by the German government shows no comparable effect. The found patterns are not significantly stronger for political trust than for trust in science, pointing to a more general decline in trust. Taken together, the findings show that border closures function not only as epidemiological interventions but also as political acts whose directional asymmetry can influence how citizens evaluate state competence during crises.