Compliance with Public Health Orders: The Role of Trust, Representation, and Expertise

Governments rely on citizen compliance to implement policies. Yet, in the current climate where citizens express low levels of trust in government, gaining compliance can prove challenging. Scholarship suggests other factors that might promote compliance even in the absence of trust. We examine two: expertise and descriptive representation across race, gender, and partisanship. We experimentally activate general (dis)trust in government and use a conjoint experiment to examine multiple factors that might shape citizens’ willingness to comply with and trust government guidance related to COVID-19. We find that shared partisanship and consultation with experts have the largest effects. We also see an effect of shared racial identity on compliance for Black Americans, at least when trust is relatively low. As we consider the role of trust, expertise, and descriptive representation across race, gender, and partisanship simultaneously, the results offer important insights into factors that underpin citizens’ willingness to comply with government mandates. Our results have important real-world implications, highlighting the importance of bipartisan responses to crises as well as ensuring racial representation in government. They also demonstrate that explicitly involving experts in decision-making processes increases citizens’ willingness to comply with policy.