By Matthew Kredell
From times of crisis can come greater insights into public policy and administration.
USC Price associate professor William Resh conducted three studies related to mixed institutional messaging during the COVID-19 crisis in the United States. He discussed the research in a Price Talk webinar back in May.
He tested the effect of President Donald Trump’s persistent conflict with expert opinion on topics of uncertainty, Trump’s implicit brand equity, and surveyed front-line workers at the local level to understand how mixed institutional messaging at the national, state and local levels affects them. They all tie into his general research theme on the ways political environments and executive interventions affect policy implementation and citizen behavior.
“What motivated me to do this is that I study public service from the national level down to the local level,” Resh said. “I specifically tend to look at the experiences of the civil servants themselves, their actions and perceptions. The individual experience of these civil servants when they’re implementing policy to stop the effects of a pandemic is important for us to understand and unpack.”
The first two studies were conducted with Tima Moldogaziev of Penn State University and John D. Marvel of George Mason University early in the pandemic.
In the first survey, they tested how people responded to conflicting messages from the president and the CDC, and how partisan motivations affected their choices.
More than 1,000 US voters were asked to make their best estimate on three points of uncertainty regarding the COVID-19 crisis:
Those surveyed first gave their best answer to those questions. A randomized control group was then exposed only to the president’s opinion, while the treatment group got both Trump’s and the CDC’s positions.
Resh found that most people in the treatment group updated their answers to align with the CDC position regardless of partisan stripe. However, in the control group, Republicans updated their responses to align with Trump while Democrats and independents did not.
“I was surprised at the extent to which people would update their priors across partisan stripes in the direction of the CDC,” Resh said.
He is planning a second round of surveying with the same panelists now that people’s partisan positions toward the pandemic seem more polarized and have potentially hardened.
The academics also tested associations with the Trump administration’s branding effort of sending a post card to every American household in March outlining guidelines recommended by the CDC to “Slow the Spread.” It was titled “President Trump’s Coronavirus Guidelines for America.”
They found a negative partisanship associated with Trump’s “brand,” with those who hated Trump noticing his name most prominently on the card. Resh is working to run the experiment again based on the letters from the Trump administration that were criticized as an attempt by Trump to claim credit for the stimulus payments that many Americans received.
For the third research effort, Resh collaborated with USC Price doctoral student Cynthia Barboza-Wilkes. They had 200 local government employees fill out daily journal surveys for three weeks in April. The results provided insights into the daily obstacles and stresses these public servants face on the front lines of the crisis.
Forty percent of respondents indicated that mixed messages on the national, state and local levels complicate their jobs.
“Some of the observations of the local government study weren’t as much surprising as appalling in the types of interactions they had with the public,” Resh said. “It really resonated with me as to how difficult it is to deal with the public, particularly during a time of crisis. The kind of emotional intelligence needed to carry out that job is pretty immense.”
Resh plans to utilize the diary approach again this fall to understand the pressures and perceptions of federal civil servants over the course of the presidential election and into the inauguration of the next president.
“This approach of understanding individual-level perceptions of civil servants under crisis, I think what we learned at the local level is going to inform the work I do at the national level,” Resh said.
Over the research as a whole, Resh concluded that mixed messaging from political elites has real impacts on the ground, citizens rely on political elites for information under crisis conditions, it helps to have positively balanced brand equity to gain people’s confidence, and uncertainty leads to conflicting views that complicate jobs on the front lines.
Associate Professor
C.C. Crawford Professor in Management and Performance