The emotive effect of government branding on citizens' trust and its boundaries: Does the personal relevance of the policy issue matter?
| Published date | 01 September 2020 |
| Author | Saar Alon‐Barkat |
| Date | 01 September 2020 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12647 |
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
The emotive effect of government branding
on citizens' trust and its boundaries: Does the
personal relevance of the policy issue matter?
Saar Alon-Barkat
Institute of Public Administration, Leiden
University, The Hague, The Netherlands
Correspondence
Saar Alon-Barkat, Institute of Public
Administration, Leiden University, The Hague,
The Netherlands.
Email: s.alon.barkat@fgga.leidenuniv.nl
Funding information
Azrieli Fellowship from the Azrieli Foundation.
Abstract
Recent studies have demonstrated the potency of gov-
ernment branding to enhance citizens' trust in govern-
ment organizations and policies. In addition, studies have
pointed to the detrimental implications of this emotive
effect, mainly its ability to compensate for organizations'
poor functioning, and accordingly to elicit undue trust. In
light of these concerns, this study explores the bound-
aries of governments' persuasion of citizens through
branding and symbolic communications. Building on
social psychology and marketing research, I hypothesize
that citizens are less susceptible to persuasion by brand-
ing the more they perceive the policy issue as personally
relevant. I test this expectation through a survey experi-
ment, focused on air pollution policy in Israel, exploiting
the natural variation in the perceived personal relevance
between citizens residing in a polluted area in the coun-
try and others. The results indicate that even high levels
of perceived personal relevance do not attenuate the
effect of symbolic brand elements. This means that the
boundaries of persuasion and manipulation through
branding are wider than expected.
Received: 31 July 2018Revised: 29 July 2019Accepted: 6 December 2019
DOI: 10.1111/padm.12647
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use,
distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.
© 2019 The Author. Public Administration published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Public Admin. 2020;98:551–569.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/padm 551
1|INTRODUCTION
Public administration scholarship has shown a growing interest in public sector branding and its potency to influence
citizens' perceptions and direct their behaviour (Eshuis and Klijn 2012; Sataøen and Wæraas 2015; Marland et al.
2017). Congruently, recent empirical studies established that symbolic brand elements entangled in government
communications (e.g., agency names, logos, colours and figures) can have a positive emotional effect on citizens,
which leads them to view public organizations and their policies and services more favourably (Marvel 2015b; Karens
et al. 2016; Alon-Barkat and Gilad 2017; Teodoro and An 2018; Alon-Barkat 2019). This growing scholarly interest
corresponds with the overall increase in the use of branding practices by public sector organizations over the past
decade or so, in part due to the expansion of digital communication and social media (Mergel and Bretschneider
2013; Mickoleit 2014).
The ability of government organizations to modify citizens' attitudes via such symbolic communications can be
perceived favourably, in so far as it mitigates citizens' distrust in organizations and undervaluation of their perfor-
mance. Accordingly, symbolic communications, as opposed to the delivery of mere factual information and substan-
tive arguments, may enable organizations to overcome citizens' negative prior beliefs and biases against the public
sector (Marvel 2015a, 2015b; Hvidman and Andersen 2016; Hvidman 2019). Nonetheless, this form of persuasion is
also highly problematic. Normatively, we expect citizens in a democratic society to form their opinions about their
government based on critical thinking, rather than on unconscious emotive responses. A yet more serious concern
regards the potency of government branding to compensate for organizations' poor performance, poorly planned
policies and logically unpersuasive explanations, as indicated by previous studies (Alon-Barkat and Gilad 2017; Alon-
Barkat 2019). Congruently, it can yield a misalignment between citizens' positive view and the ‘real world’, which
would undermine governments' democratic accountability and responsiveness. Moreover, government agencies
and/or politicians controlling them could exploit branding as an instrument of propaganda, and seek to manipulate
public opinion and mitigate justified public criticism of agencies' failures.
The above-mentioned concerns about the negative implications of branding for democracy are the main motiva-
tion of this study. These concerns necessitate a better theoretical understanding of the boundaries of governments'
persuasion (and possibly manipulation) of citizens through branding, which would enable us to assess more effec-
tively the scope of the risk that these practices pose for democracy. In line with this motivation, this study focuses
on an important potential limitation that regards the perceived personal relevance of the policy issue. I explore
whether the effect of symbolic brand elements in communications is restricted to policy issues that are not per-
ceived by citizens as having a significant consequence for their personal lives, or rather that citizens are similarly sus-
ceptible to persuasion via branding even with regard to such personally relevant issues. This moderating factor is
particularly important, since we tend to expect these affected groups to pay more attention to government actions
that concern their interests and to hold them to account for their consequences to a greater extent. That expectation
can be supported, theoretically, by the social psychology Elaboration Likelihood Model (Petty and Cacioppo 1986).
The model postulates that the more people perceive the communication as personally relevant, the more inclined
they are to scrutinize its message, and accordingly the less likely they are to rely on peripheral, symbolic elements.
Employing a survey experiment, I test this latter expectation in the empirical context of the Israeli Environmental
Protection Ministry and its policy regarding air pollution in a specific area—the Haifa Bay. The research sample
(N= 859) consists of citizens residing in the polluted area, matched with residents of other cities in the centre of the
country that are not exposed to high levels of air pollution. I present all participants with a policy plan regarding the
air pollution in the Haifa Bay area, while experimentally varying both its appearance (familiar symbolic elements from
the Ministry's communications versus two control groups) and substantive information (logically persuasive versus
unpersuasive policy plans). I examine the effects of these manipulations on participants' trust in the policy plan
across the two areas, and test the hypothesis that residents of the polluted area are less affected by symbolic brand
elements (and more affected by the differences in substantive arguments). I further supplement this observational
552 ALON-BARKAT
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