Crisis communication strategies, government reputation signals, and health compliance willingness during COVID-19: a randomized experiment in the context of China’s zero-COVID policy

Although government reputation is widely recognized as a resource for securing public compliance during health crises, little is known about which specific reputational attributes members of the public rely on when forming trust and deciding whether to comply with costly protective behaviors. Drawing on Bureaucratic Reputation Theory, this study develops a four-dimensional government crisis reputation framework: leadership, accountability, transparency, and adaptability, organized along two theoretically derived axes: Competence–Integrity and Authority–Responsiveness. We test its psychological consequences through a randomized survey experiment ( N = 1,593) that exposed respondents to simulated crisis-communication messages containing different reputation signals during China’s zero-COVID period. Manipulation checks confirm that each signal produced its largest increase on the targeted perception dimension. However, when the four reputation perceptions were entered simultaneously into a structural equation model, only leadership exerted a strong effect on government trust, while transparency retained a modest direct path. Accountability and adaptability lost their predictive power once leadership and transparency were accounted for. A nested model comparison further suggests that the data are consistent with trust fully mediating the association between reputation perceptions and compliance willingness, with no direct reputation-to-compliance paths remaining significant. The trust-compliance link intensified as behavioral cost rose, exerting a stronger effect on high-cost behaviors, such as voluntary quarantine, than on low-cost behaviors, such as mask-wearing. These findings point to a leadership-anchored trust mechanism through which government reputation signaling is associated with compliance willingness. This study extends bureaucratic reputation theory to the individual psychological level and, based on the sample and zero-COVID context examined here, offers crisis communicators a cost-contingent framework for reputational messaging under conditions of institutional dependence. Whether this framework extends to other populations, governance systems, and public health emergencies remains a question for future research.