Government slogans and fancy messaging campaigns actually make people trust the state less during energy crises.
April 25, 2026
Original Paper
Participation Builds Trust, Not Framing: Insights from a National Energy-Transition Experiment
SSRN · 6636970
The Takeaway
Politicians often believe that framing a policy correctly will win over a skeptical public. A national experiment with 3,000 people found that value-based communication almost always fails to build trust. In some cases, these messaging attempts actually backfired and made people more suspicious of the government's motives. The only thing that consistently increased trust was giving people a real role in the decision-making process. Participation is the only effective way to build institutional legitimacy when dealing with difficult transitions.
From the abstract
Institutional trust is a critical determinant of public cooperation in the energy transition, yet little is known about how different framings of government communication influence trust in practice. This study reports results from a large-scale national experiment (N ≈ 3,000) embedded in a Participatory Value Evaluation (PVE) on heat-transition policy. Participants were randomly assigned to one of six value-based framing conditions, or a control group: environmental, financial, or stability mes