Which Matters More in Coproduction? Political Message, Policy, or Factual Information

• Published date: 01 May 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/02750740231213949
• Author: Huafang Li,Elaine Yi Lu
• Date: 01 May 2024

Which Matters More in Coproduction?

Political Message, Policy, or Factual

Information

Huafang Li

1

and Elaine Yi Lu

2

Abstract

To coproduce better policy outcomes, governments and citizens need to work together. However, information asymmetry

between the two parties inf‌luences the coproduction adversely. Nowadays, the multiplicity of information and its potential

incongruence add to information asymmetry and make the impact of information on coproduction trickier than ever. This

study examines the effects of political message, policy, and factual information on citizens’coproduction activities.

Analyzing the effects of federal and state leaders’tweets, New York City’s COVID-19 policies, reported COVID-19

cases and deaths, and the city’s visits and public transportation ridership, the f‌indings show that politicians’message, con-

gruent or not, did not inf‌luence citizens’coproduction activities as measured by visits and public transit ridership. Policy

implementation information improved coproduction, and the perceptions of factual information contributed to intended

coproduction.

Keywords

coproduction, policy communication, health communication, information congruence, information credibility, traff‌ic

To ensure the effective provision of public goods and ser-

vices, governments and citizens need to work together. The

COVID-19 pandemic is a recent case in point: governments

alone cannot win the battle against the coronavirus without a

citizen’s coproduction (Chen & Liu, 2020; Li, 2020b) of

social distancing, masking, or vaccination. However, citizens

are at times reluctant to coproduce public goods and services

with governments. Availability, accessibility, and credibility

of information are increasingly important factors that poten-

tially either encourage or discourage coproduction (Li, 2021).

This COVID-19 pandemic and other major crises have

further highlighted the critical need for effective information

dissemination and the enormous gap in translating informa-

tion into coproduction during crises (Garnett & Kouzmin,

2007).

Nowadays, information availability may no longer be an

issue, but we argue that the translation of valid information

into residents’coproduction faces even more challenges

than before: increased distrust of governments in this politi-

cally polarizing environment, information asymmetry, misin-

formation, incongruent messages, and algorithm-enabled

group dynamics that self-reinforce social or cognitive prefer-

ences for certain types of information. With the rise of the

social media age, the traditional ways that residents receive

information from authorities such as governments and press

organizations are under attack by inf‌luential content gener-

ated through various social media sites. As Hall (2021,

p. 822) pointed out, “Social media, in its nascency,

removed barriers to entry into the informal policy

agenda.”If a government’s external communication perfor-

mance with the public was an issue before (Pandey &

Garnett, 2006), the challenge to cut through an increasingly

noisy information sphere and communicate policy direc-

tions effectively to residents is signif‌icantly harder in this

social media age.

Adding to the challenge of this multiplicity of information

sources are incongruent opinions that are now magnif‌ied by

social media outlets. For example, if a governor’s message

was to stay at home to prevent the COVID-19 on a particular

day but a president disagreed and sent an opposite message

(e.g., reopening), then the incongruent messages between

leaders send conf‌licting instructions that are impossible for

an individual to follow simultaneously (Acemoglu, 2020;

Fukuyama, 2020). In addition, much excellent research on

1

Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of

Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

2

Public Management, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York, NY,

USA

Corresponding Author:

Huafang Li, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of

Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.

Email: lihuafang@pitt.edu

Article

American Review of Public Administration

2024, Vol. 54(4) 354–376

© The Author(s) 2023

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/02750740231213949

journals.sagepub.com/home/arp

information communication during crises focuses on organi-

zations, for example, cross-sector emergency information

networks (Wukich et al., 2019), organizations responsible

for protecting citizens (Comfort, 2007), and interagency

(Kapucu, 2006). As a result, the impact of information on

citizen behaviors during crises is understudied. Our research

extends crisis communication to coproduction by citizens as

a whole.

Specif‌ically, this study explores the varying impacts of

political message, policy, and factual information and their

incongruence on citizen coproduction behaviors. A compre-

hensive dataset on citizens’visits and transit activities was

obtained to capture the extent to which citizens were codeliv-

ering closing or opening policies by staying at home or not.

The three nodes mentioned above recognize three aspects

(public administration, public policy, and public health)

that Holzer and Newbold (2020) proposed to respond to

the COVID-19 pandemic. From an informational perspec-

tive, their call for action requires public administrators’mes-

sages, policy implementation information, and health-related

facts. Although information from private parties may inf‌lu-

ence citizen coproduction, this study focused on public orga-

nizations and leaders, which are critical to f‌ighting the

coronavirus (Gollust et al., 2020; Hatcher, 2020). The gap

that this research aims to address is the heterogeneous

effects of different types of public information that were com-

municated to citizens in order to more effectively persuade

citizens to coproduce public service outcomes in times of

crises and message incongruence. Therefore, the study asks

how different types of information inf‌luence citizens’copro-

duction activities to shed light on the relationship between

information and coproduction and to understand how to

inform the public more effectively in the future. This

study’s main goal is to provide an overview of political mes-

sages, policy, and factual information and their effects on cit-

izens’coproduction.

From the start, we shall note that this study focused on the

citizens’collective responses to the pandemic and examined

the overall effects of three types of information on citizen

coproduction at an aggregated city level (New York City).

Our study period includes all critical steps in pandemic

control and economic recovery between Feb 29, 2020 (the

start of the COVID-19 outbreak in New York City (NYC)),

to September 30, 2020 (well into Phase #4, the last phase

of reopening). We posit that information plays an important

role in varying effectiveness and survival of policy outcomes

that coproduction aims to achieve. In light of the increasingly

polarized policy sphere and noisy information sphere,

impacts of information multiplicity and incongruence will

be a prominent factor in understanding political frictions in

coproduction.

The rest of the paper proceeds as follows. After review-

ing the literature on coproduction, information asymmetry,

communication, and congruence, we then present the data

sources and coding schemes used for the analysis. Finally,

we show the f‌indings, offer explanations, and discuss the

implications.

Literature Review and Research Context

Information Asymmetry and Coproduction

Coproduction, essential to the provision of public services

and goods (Ostrom, 1996; Parks et al., 1981), is often

def‌ined as the critical mix of activities that public organiza-

tions and citizens individually or collectively engage to

provide public goods and services that result in positive

policy outcomes and individual behavioral changes

(Brudney, 2020; Brudney & England, 1983; Li, 2020a).

Citizens are not only consumers but also coproducers

(Parks et al., 1981; Whitaker, 1980), with some scholars

arguing that citizens individually or collectively can cocreate

values or cogovern with governments (Amorim et al., 2020;

Cheng, 2019). One enabling factor is symmetric information

sharing between citizens and governments (Brandsen &

Honingh, 2016; Brudney & England, 1983; Ferris, 1984;

Nabatchi, 2010; Whitaker, 1980). However, previous

studies on coproduction overlook that information is often

asymmetric (Li, 2020a, 2020b). On the one hand, the unavail-

ability, inaccessibility, and unprocessability of public infor-

mation worsen the information asymmetry between

governments and citizens. On the other hand, even if the

information is available, accessible, and easy to process, gov-

ernments might be unable to communicate information effec-

tively to citizens because of costs associated with

customization and personalization of information based on

individual information preferences and social demographic

characteristics (Li, 2020a). The information asymmetry

worsens and inf‌luences coproduction more negatively when

citizens distrust governments (Li, 2020b, 2021). As Stiglitz

(2002) suggested, we need to f‌ind ways to reduce information

asymmetry in political processes and mitigate its

consequences.

Governments now can communicate with the public

through various information channels to reduce the degree

of information asymmetry. Using information technology,

governments can increase their communication effectiveness

and responsiveness and thus improve citizen coproduction

(Clark et al., 2020; Guan et al., 2021; Wu et al., 2021).

Particularly, politicians can use social media to better their

relationships with citizens if proper information is communi-

cated (Fatema et al., 2020). However, during the pandemic,

rumors, conspiracy theories, inaccurate advice, and unsup-

ported suggestions about f‌ighting the virus became over-

whelming on social media. The situation of confusing

information credibility is worse when the public distrusts

governments and the society is politically polarized

(Fukuyama, 2020). The public trust in the U.S. government

is already relatively low and still declining (Rainie &

Perrin, 2019). So, how can governments overcome the

Li and Lu 355