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Do stakeholders analyze their audience? The communication switch and stakeholder personal versus public communication choices

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Abstract

In the spirit of the policy sciences, knowledge should be used to improve the practice of democracy. In today’s policy world, communication is a key element of policy making. Too often groups become trapped in promoting their own narrative rather than building bridges to other groups by adopting alternative narratives. In this study, we ask, when involved in a public policy issue, do stakeholders analyze their audience? In other words, do stakeholders consider larger values and beliefs in an attempt to help orient a problem or issues when they move from discussing the issue with like-minded groups to discussing the issue with the general public? Our study uses a survey to examine how stakeholders involved in a river restoration issue switched or did not switch from their own personal message choice to what they believed was the best communication choice for talking about river restoration with the public. Overall, 47% of stakeholders switched their preference when asked how river restoration should be discussed with the public. We examine how attitudinal indicators, background information, and demographics related to which stakeholders switch and which did not switch their choices. The implications of these findings for democracy and policy analysis along with the ethical considerations of the research are discussed.

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Fig. 1

Notes

  1. To ensure that the models did not suffer from a rare event bias (i.e., too few 1 s in relation to the 0 s), all of the probit models were also estimated using a complementary log–log (cloglog) distribution. The cloglog is designed for models where the dependent variable represents a rare event, and has a steeper s-shaped slope than the probit. The results of these cloglog estimations were substantively no different from those of the probit. The probit models were presented because not all of the dependent variables represent rare events, and we wanted to keep all of the models the same.

  2. Variable definitions and question wording can be found in Table 5 of “Appendix”.

  3. The models were kept consistent to allow comparisons across models and across projects. Future research will examine this relationship in greater detail.

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Acknowledgments

The project described was supported by NSF award number IIA-1301792 from the NSF Idaho EPSCoR Program and by the National Science Foundation. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of NSF.

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Correspondence to Mark K. McBeth.

Appendix

Appendix

See Table 5.

Table 5 Variable definitions

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McBeth, M.K., Lybecker, D.L. & Stoutenborough, J.W. Do stakeholders analyze their audience? The communication switch and stakeholder personal versus public communication choices. Policy Sci 49, 421–444 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-016-9252-2

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