Research On Influence Of Crisis Communication Strategy On Government Trust

Recent years have witnessed China‘s rapid and profound transformation both economically and socially.The principal contradictions in our society have changed causing frequent public crises.Some of the crises were public health incidents,such as the COVID-19 in early 2020,some were natural disasters,such as the Wenchuan Earthquake in2008 and the Beijing Rainstorm in 2012,some were social security problems,such as the child abuse incident in Honghuanglan kindergarten and the Jilin Changchun vaccine Incident.These events often happened out of blue and were unpredictable while they had a wide range of impact.Not only did they trigger public panic,anxiety and other negative emotions,but also cause great harm to government trust if they were not handled properly.Therefore,how to response appropriately after a crisis to maintain a good reputation of the government has become one of the most important challenges that requires strong crisis management capabilities of relevant government agencies.This paper intends to investigate the mechanism of the damage and the restoration of government trust and generalize the most effective response strategy for the government after a public crisis based on the Attribution theory and Situational crisis communication theory by conducting situational experiments using a real case in China as the background.The results are as follows:(1)When the public attributes the occurrence of a crisis to external causes,the government trust could hardly be compromised.On contrary,government trust would be severely undermined when the public believes that the crisis was caused by internal factors within the government.(2)The more stably the public believes the cause of the crisis exists,the worse the damage of the government trust will be,and vice versa.(3)By instructing stakeholders to attribute more crisis responsibility to external causes,the government trust in terms of ability,integrity and goodwill can be effectively repaired.(4)Similarly,the research on the restoration of government trust shows that in the dimension of integrity,government trust can be efficiently restored by guiding stakeholders to believe that the cause of the crisis is not stable.(5)Among single crisis response strategies,the reshaping strategy is proven to work well in terms of integrity and goodwill,while the denial strategy will exacerbate the deterioration of the integrity and goodwill dimensions of government trust.However,the desalination and sympathy-based strategies cannot actually repair government trust.And,the restoration of government trust in ability dimension can be difficult through any single crisis response strategy.(6)Among the combined crisis response strategies,the combined strategy of reshaping with one or two other strategiesc can repair government trust,for example the combined strategy of reshaping + sympathy and reshaping+ desalination + sympathy can effectively repair the government trust in terms of integrity and goodwill,reshaping+desalination can repair the government trust in terms of goodwill,desalination + sympathy type of combined strategies have no obvious effect on restoring government trust,and the combined crisis response strategies cannot effectively restore government trust in ability dimension.