Is the perceived risk of fire-related injury and trust in local authoritiesaffected by rescue services’ actual ability?

Rescue services are one of the most crucial actors in providing fire-related societal protection, particularly interms of response times. To achieve this, considerable funding and/or full-time organisations are required –something that is not always feasible and leads to differences in rescue service related protection in differentmunicipalities. In turn, the question is how such variations affect the perceived risk of being injured in a resi-dential fire and levels of general institutional trust in the municipality. By utilising a dataset on risk perceptionand trust, combined with data on the ability and structure of municipal rescue services, this study can show that amunicipal’s average perception of the risk of attaining a fire-related injury closely follows response times –indicating that individuals living in areas with less societal protection are aware of this fact. However, the resultsalso indicate that general institutional trust and perception of risk on a municipal level seems to relate to eachother in such a way that municipal types (with similar sociodemographic characteristics and rescue serviceability) congregate around similar levels of perceived risk and trust. In turn, this study therefore indicates thatperceived risk and trust differs in different municipalities and that efficiency measurements not necessarilyencompass all these differences.