Building Credibility and Cooperation in Low-Trust Settings: Persuasion and Source Accountability in Liberia During the 2014–2015 Ebola Crisis

• Author: Lily L. Tsai,Benjamin S. Morse,Robert A. Blair
• DOI: 10.1177/0010414019897698
• Published date: 01 September 2020
• Date: 01 September 2020
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414019897698

Comparative Political Studies

2020, Vol. 53(10-11) 1582 –1618

© The Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/0010414019897698

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Article

Building Credibility

and Cooperation in

Low-Trust Settings:

Persuasion and Source

Accountability in Liberia

During the 2014–2015

Ebola Crisis

Lily L. Tsai1, Benjamin S. Morse1,

and Robert A. Blair2

Abstract

How can governments in low-trust settings overcome their credibility deficit

when promoting public welfare? To answer this question, we evaluate the

effectiveness of the Liberian government’s door-to-door canvassing campaign

during the 2014–2015 Ebola epidemic, which aimed to persuade residents to

voluntarily comply with policies for containing the disease. Combining data

from an original representative survey of Monrovia during the crisis with

variation in the campaign’s reach and using multiple identification strategies,

we find that the informational campaign was remarkably effective at increasing

adherence to safety precautions, support for contentious control policies,

and general trust in government. To uncover the pathways through which

the campaign proved so effective, we conducted over 80 in-depth qualitative

interviews in 40 randomly sampled communities. This investigation suggests

that local intermediaries were effective because their embeddedness in

communities subjected them to monitoring and sanctioning, thereby assuring

their fellow residents that they were accountable and thus credible.

1Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

2Brown University, Providence, RI, USA

Corresponding Author:

Lily L. Tsai, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge,

MA 02139, USA.

Email: l_tsai@mit.edu

897698CPSXXX10.1177/0010414019897698Comparative Political StudiesTsai et al.

research-article2020

Tsai et al. 1583

Keywords

African politics, health politics and policy, politics of growth/development,

persuasion, trust, source credibility

Introduction

In countries where government corruption and abuse of power is pervasive

(Keefer, 2007; Treisman, 2007), citizens often harbor distrust and cynicism

about the honesty and intentions of those in government (see, for example,

Seligson, 2002). But what happens when these governments act in the public

interest and need citizens to believe what they say and voluntarily comply

with their directives? What can authorities do when they need to implement

critical initiatives such as vaccination campaigns or when they face national

emergencies and existential threats such as insurgencies or natural disasters?

In this article, we examine political persuasion in low-trust settings. Because

coercion tends to be ineffective, counterproductive, and prohibitively costly,

government authorities often turn to informational campaigns to persuade citi-

zens that it is in their own interests to voluntarily comply with their directives.

But are these campaigns effective? Under what conditions can governments in

low-trust settings succeed at persuading citizens to believe what they say?

Theories of political communication and institutional trust give us reason

to doubt that deeply distrusted authorities can persuade citizens to believe

what they say during times of crisis. This research shows that elites lack cred-

ibility as sources of information because citizens are likely to believe they

have ulterior motives or incentives to deceive the public (Alt et al., 2016;

Baron, 2006). Perceived differences in institutional expertise and institu-

tional trust may also account for variation in credibility. Citizens are more

likely to believe messages from elites whom they see as knowledgeable about

political issues or, often more importantly, “like-minded” in having similar

interests or values (Downs, 1957, p. 223; Gilens & Murakawa, 2002).

Existing studies, however, say little about how actors can build trust and

credibility when they do not already have it. Much of this work treats infor-

mation sources as either credible or not credible, implicitly or explicitly

assuming that credibility is time-invariant (see, for example, Lupia et al.,

1998, and experimental studies by Alt et al., 2016; Botero et al., 2015).

Recent studies have shown how existing credibility can be sustained or dam-

aged (e.g., Cone et al., 2019). But little empirical work exists on what an

information source that has a long-standing reputation for not being credible

can do to improve its credibility in the short term.

One approach, at least in the context of the United States, involves direct

engagement between government workers and citizens, such as door-to-door

1584 Comparative Political Studies 53(10-11)

canvassing and mass media campaigns (Bagcchi, 2015; Chong & Druckman,

2007, pp. 57 & 99–118). Evidence suggests that this form of direct engage-

ment can persuade citizens that particular authorities are trustworthy sources

of information, but this research comes almost exclusively from countries

where general trust in government is already relatively high. In low-trust set-

tings where citizens believe authorities are predatory or malevolent, govern-

ment efforts to engage with citizens often fall on deaf ears. Indeed, when

individuals mistrust the messenger, they tend to cling to their existing beliefs,

even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary (Gerber & Green,

1999, pp. 189–210). Uncertainty and fear, which prevail in crisis situations,

can exacerbate these tendencies (Jost et al., 2009, p. 244). In northern Nigeria,

where villagers rarely encounter government service provision, distrust of

government led to years of resistance against government vaccination cam-

paigns, contributing to the country’s status as one of the last to eradicate the

disease (Grossman et al., 2018). In Liberia and Sierra Leone, where civil war

and state abuse have made citizens suspicious of the police and other security

forces, widespread non-reporting and reluctance to cooperate with police

investigations have proven to be an enduring barrier to police effectiveness

and citizen security (Blair et al., 2019).

How can governments in low-trust settings overcome their credibility

deficit when promoting public welfare? Empirical research involving sys-

tematic data on citizens’ attitudes and especially behaviors is scarce, and data

from crisis situations, where researchers face unique challenges to collecting

data, are scarcer still. Yet it is precisely these settings where the need to

understand how governments can persuade their citizens to act in the public

interest is most pressing.

In this article, we address this gap by studying the effectiveness of the

Government of Liberia’s (GoL) effort to engender trust and cooperation

through ground-level canvassing during the 2014–2015 Ebola Crisis. Widely

viewed as both a health crisis and a governance crisis, the epidemic provides a

critical case for building our theoretical understanding of how governments can

persuade citizens to cooperate under the most challenging of circumstances.

In the initial stages of the epidemic, mistrust rooted in decades of corrup-

tion and abuse led many Liberians to believe Ebola was a ploy by the govern-

ment to generate more aid funding (International Crisis Group, 2015). As a

result, many refused to comply with preventive measures and social distanc-

ing policies, causing the disease to spread unchecked (Blair et al., 2017). As

conditions deteriorated, the GoL initiated an ambitious public awareness

campaign in which locally recruited intermediaries working on behalf of

government were deployed into communities to persuade their fellow citi-

zens to trust health authorities and comply with control policies.