The Covid-19 pandemic was a stress test to democracies. To date, literature lacks a comprehensive assessment of the political legitimacy of governments’ crisis responses in the context of multi-level political decision-making systems. LEGITIMULT aims to fill this gap in literature by analyzing the relationship between multilevel governance and political legitimacy from different angles. Work package 3 focuses on the role of democratic participation and the rule of law in a politically legitimate crisis governance. This working paper aims to develop a model of a democratic crisis governance and its empirical indicators based on the example of the Covid19 crisis. Thereby, it draws on the insights from a review of the extant literature on the democratic quality of the Covid-19 crisis governance. In addition, it presents an overview of the available datasets which assess the democratic quality and political legitimacy of governments’ Covid-19 crisis responses. Finally, it formulates first ideas on case selection for more in-depth analyses. Thus, this first deliverable provides the conceptual foundations of work package 3. Based on the suggested conceptualization and indicators of a democratic crisis governance, we will map the democratic quality of the Covid-19 crisis governance in 31 countries. To study the patterns of the results of this mapping, we will select a set of countries for an in-depth analysis of the impact of multi-level governance on the political legitimacy of Covid-19 crisis governance.