Client: The Fletcher School – Tufts University
Project: A policymaker’s guide to gain, retain and restore trust in the age of uncertainty
Date: 2021
Ripple Research partnered with the Fletcher School to devise a playbook and create a specialised report for building trust in a crisis that guides governments on how to gain, retain and restore trust in the age of uncertainty.
The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University is one of America’s leading schools for international relations. Ripple Research partnered with the Fletcher School to devise a playbook and a specialised report for building trust in a crisis that guides governments on how to gain, retain and restore trust in the age of uncertainty.
Why it was important to evaluate the landscape of trust and address the trust deficit
In uncertain times, understanding the level of trust and confidence held by citizens for government responses to public health and socio-economic crises can waver. Perceptions about risks and the agencies that manage those risks can impact the efficacy of public management. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic represents one of the most uncertain time periods in modern history, that is why it was crucial to work with the Fletcher School to ascertain the causes behind fluctuations in public trust in institutions and in government agencies and to identify policies that can be implemented to most effectively rectify this.
Our approach
We conducted a multi-country analysis from January to July 2020 of the COVID-19 government and policy measures in China, India, New Zealand, South Africa, The United States of America, The United Kingdom, Sweden, South Korea and Singapore.
By using open-source intelligence and public social data, we built a dataset consisting of over 830 million online interactions, generated by over 58 million unique authors from over a hundred media channels across the nine target countries. This represents one of the largest COVID-19 related datasets assembled to date.
The vast reach and diversity of social media enabled us to identify how people are adapting to the continuity of the COVID-19 crisis and allowed us to examine the public responses at unrivalled scale.
We applied sentiment mining and emotion analysis to track the perceptions and emotional responses to the pandemic. We used this data to develop a unique ground-up methodology to calculate the ebbs and flows of public trust that is significantly more nuanced than polling and surveys. This approach to collect and analyse unprompted and unstructured data was taken in order to uncover how authorities were leveraging or forcing trust in institutions to manage public sentiment and obedience in reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Social research blends quantitative and qualitative methods and compliments both. With social intelligence data we can analyse perceptions of hundreds of thousands of people but still get granular with the data looking at individual posts or specific demographic cohorts.
What we discovered
After carefully reviewing the unfolding of various policy measures within the selected countries alongside the resulting public responses and perceptions, Ripple Research devised a playbook with four key strategies for trust building for policymakers based on the observed efficacy of various measures.
These four pathways to build, maintain and regain trust are encapsulated in our ‘Trust in a Crisis Playbook’.
Strategy 1:
Trust through legitimization
What is it?
Legitimization involves the positioning of a leader or authority in such a way as to justify their actions as appropriate
Where did we observe it?
All nine countries.
How did it play out?
Political and institutional legitimacy is crucial to the ability to govern and manage, especially in times of crisis. Countries responded to the COVID crisis by adopting new policies, laws or regulations. Some went even further and declared States of Emergency that suspended parliamentary and administrative processes and granted exceptional powers to manage a crisis situation.
Strategy 2:
Trust through competence
What is it?
Trust and confidence flowing from the perception that the leader or authority can handle the situation and deliver results.
Where did we observe it?
China
Singapore
South Korea
How did it play out?
Competence-based trust is built on the perception that a leader or authority has the technical skills, experience, and reliability to perform the required tasks and deliver the desired results. This competence-based trust can contribute to output legitimacy and even outweigh a lack of input legitimacy.
Strategy 3:
Trust through shared beliefs
What is it?
Trust-building strategies that appeal to shared values of beliefs.
Where did we observe it?
India
Sweden
United Kingdom
United States of America
How did it play out?
People form or join groups based on common values in order to seek identity and solidarity and reduce social uncertainty. This in-group trust is often defined negatively in opposition to an “other”.
Additionally, a strong sense of shared values tends to lead to biased performance assessment: public authorities that build trust in this way may avoid rigorous judgements of their performance. In-group trust is often strong enough to obscure outcome inequality or incompetence.
Strategy 4:
Trust through benevolence or integrity
What is it?
Benevolence-based or integrity-based trust occurs when people perceive an authority is acting sincerely in the best interests of the constituents. This may be demonstrated through caring, empathy, altruism, fairness or sincerity. Behavioral integrity depends on the perceived alignment of the leader's values and actions, rather than the outcomes. This value congruence can be a powerful trust builder.
Where did we observe it?
New Zealand
How did it play out?
In a world of inauthentic leaders prioritizing the maintenance of political power over the needs of citizens, leaders who represent integrity and benevolence stand out. They are perceived to be open, empathetic, candid and transparent with their constituents, taking them into their confidence and creating a bond with supporters. Most importantly, they display a degree of vulnerability, which can be key to garnering trust. This was the case for New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.
How this work can help
guide policymakers
Our collaboration with the Fletcher School has created an important tool for policy analysts to help them assess how effective leaders and authorities are in gaining and maintaining public trust in their interventions. It also has the capacity to provide policy makers with a barometer that offers a more representative, inclusive guide to public sentiment given the vast quantity of OSINT data analysed. Lastly, policy makers can call upon the findings of our study to obtain near real time feedback on the movements in trust and make course corrections where necessary.