Abstract
Cross-sector collaboration depends on legitimacy, yet research treats legitimacy mainly as its outcome rather than a reason officials establish it. We develop a two-sided framework in which officials pursue input and output legitimacy, which rest on responsiveness to public pref erences and on solving community problems, while citizens grant or withhold trust. Study 1 is a field experiment that invited 36,383 officials in US municipalities to share knowledge with researchers in a disaster resilience survey. Municipalities were block randomized to emails reporting the FEMA National Risk Index rating, the share of state residents supporting research collaboration, both, or neither. Risk information increased survey starts by 12 percent relative to the control group, whereas the public support cue alone lowered starts. Study 2 is a survey experiment with 1,186 US adults who read that local officials declined or accepted an invitation to collaborate with researchers. Compared with declining, accepting raised trust in local government by about 35 percent, and by about 40 percent when officials cited public support. Higher risk lowered trust, but the advantage of accepting grew modestly with risk. Problem information thus motivates officials to coproduce knowledge, and citizens reward the resulting collaboration. These findings reveal an asymmetry between the legitimacy that officials pursue and the legitimacy that citizens grant, with implications for practitioner-researcher collaboration.
Figure 2: Collaboration start and progress across the four experimental conditions
