Winners and losers: communicating the potential impacts of policies

Abstract

Individual decision-makers need communications that succinctly describe potential harms and benefits of different options, but policymakers or citizens evaluating a policy are rarely given a balanced and easily understood summary of the potential outcomes of their decision. We review current policy option communication across diverse domains such as taxes, health, climate change, and international trade, followed by reviews of guidance and evidence for communication effectiveness. Our conceptual synthesis identifies four characteristics of policy options that make their communication particularly difficult: heterogeneous impacts on different segments of the population, multiple outcomes, long timescales, and large uncertainties. For communicators that are trying to inform rather than persuade, these complexities reveal a core tension between issue coverage and comprehensibility. We find little empirical evidence for how to communicate policy options effectively. We identify promising current communications, analyze them based on the above synthesis, and suggest priorities for future research. Recognizing the particular challenges of balanced, effective policy option communications could lead to better guidelines and support for policy decision-making.

Communicating evidence for policy makers in icons and tables- What works? preprint

“…However, the formats and graphics have never been empirically evaluated in a large sample of either target users (practitioners and policy makers) or the general public (Brick et al, 2018).…”

“…Users in this survey were not being asked to make a trade-off with comprehensibility, and may not have recognized this tension when they requested more information. In evidence communication, there is a fundamental trade-off between presenting more complete or complex information and ensuring it is understood by readers who have finite time, attention, and cognitive abilities (for a review, see Brick et al, 2018). Communications need to describe the most important options and their potential outcomes, and ideally communicators will combine expert recommendations with requests from the target population.…”

“…Extensive research has evaluated which communication contents and formats support comprehension for individual-level decisions (Brick et al, 2019;McInerny et al, 2014;Trevena et al, 2013). However, there is a lack of systematic evaluations of how to communicate policy-level evidence (Brick et al, 2018). Even in public service organizations seeking to inform rather than persuade, message design is sometimes optimized towards user engagement (e.g., website clicks).…”

A modest proposal for restoration ecology

“…I propose that restoration efforts might benefit from more attention to the social science on communication. When local stakeholders understand the expected harms and benefits of different policies, they are more able to select restoration policies that match their goals and values (Brick et al ). This approach to shared decision‐making may help preserve not only native species and biodiversity but also a thriving future for humans.…”

“…Achieving shared governance with procedural justice requires communicating policy options in balanced and honest ways that help people make informed decisions. A recent review of how policies are communicated suggests that stakeholders frequently lack key information and communicators lack effective strategies for helping others reach decisions (Brick et al ).…”