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To discuss topics that need future research in governmental communication; setting the research agenda.

Based on two studies by the Research Group for Governmental Communication.

The development of this field would benefit from research on monitoring methods, accountability and return of investment.

Focuses of governmental organisations.

Priorities to professionalise communication.

Based on two studies that are unique in Europe: trend study governmental communication and development of a balanced scorecard for communication in this field.

One of the most important challenges of our society is to cope with the transition of our society into a more and more digital one. Thus, the political and governmental system has to face and adapt to those transitions as well. This chapter focuses on the social media communication of the British, German and French national governments. The goal of this chapter is to compare the social media communication of these three countries in 2015 within each other as well as to draw a comparison between the results of two predecessor studies in 2011 and 2014. A new special focus of this chapter will be on the interactive discourse between society/citizens and governments.

This study aims to achieve a better understanding of communication quality and how it can be measured in the municipal context. A previously developed instrument for measuring communication in municipalities is tested and evaluated.

The instrument draws on the balanced scorecard of Kaplan and Norton and quality control procedures as utilised by the European Foundation of Quality Measurement (EFQM). For municipalities, communication quality can be defined as the degree to which communication contributes towards the effectiveness of municipal policy and how it strengthens the relationship between citizens and municipal organisations. Three communication functions are given, and for each function seven quality criteria, for example responsiveness, are defined. The latter serve as an umbrella for several indicators that are assessed on a Likert scale. The results for four municipalities in The Netherlands are presented and compared, and the instrument is evaluated.

The corporate communication scores were relatively high, while the policy communication scores were low. Of the quality criteria, accessibility and publicity scored high and responsiveness low. The instrument has mainly been developed on the basis of auditor and self‐assessment, as municipalities have, as yet, few facts and figures with which to support the assessment. The measurement instrument needs to be integrated in the organisation's planning cycle, as reflection on the results can help in implementing improvements in quality. The measurement process stimulates dialogue on communication quality and the priorities to be set for communication policy.

The study is based on four cases. The instrument needs to be tested across a range of governmental‐level organisations.

Municipalities can use this instrument to improve the added value of communication.

A detailed description of the results of applying an instrument, such as this, developed for assessing communication quality, has not until now been published.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the Chinese government generates authority during a crisis through discursive practices expressed in social media.

Using the theoretical framework of authority and the method of genre analysis, this study examined the top 100 forwarded posts on Weibo about a high-profile murder to determine the mechanisms involved in generating authority.

This study provides empirical support that building and maintaining authority distinguishes governments from other social actors during crisis communication. The genre analysis demonstrates that the strategic use of genre chain and genre mixing contributes to the construction of governments’ authority during a crisis. Furthermore, this study suggests the performative and social constructionist approach to understand governments’ authority in the digital age on two levels: a situationally-constructed concept that goes beyond the context of fixed institutions and a relationally-constructed concept that is promoted through discursive collaboration among various social actors.

This study does not directly assess the effectiveness of a government’s ability to construct its authority. Nor does it examine the construction of governments’ authority outside the context of an authoritarian regime. These issues should be addressed in future research.

This study offers governmental organizations some practical insights that can be used to infuse a constructive aspect of authority into their crisis communication plans, practices and processes.

Here, authority is seen as a social construction that foregrounds the discursive, performative, constructive and communicative dimensions of crisis communication. Moreover, this study points to the need for a more complex integrated perspective in crisis communication that includes and connects corporate and government crisis communication.

Informed by the third-person effects (TPE) theory, this study aims to analyze restrictive versus corrective actions in response to the perceived TPE of misinformation on social media in the USA.

The authors conducted an online survey among 1,793 adults in the USA in early April. All participants were randomly enrolled in this research through a professional survey company. The structural equation modeling via Amos 20 was adopted for hypothesis testing.

Results indicated that individuals also perceived that others were more influenced by misinformation about COVID-19 than they were. Further, such a perceptual gap was associated with public support for governmental restrictions and corrective action. Negative affections toward health misinformation directly affected public support for governmental restrictions rather than corrective action. Support for governmental restrictions could further facilitate corrective action.

This study examined the applicability of TPE theory in the context of digital health misinformation during a unique global crisis. It explored the significant role of negative affections in influencing restrictive and corrective actions. Practically, this study offered implications for information and communication educators and practitioners.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-08-2020-0386

The purpose of the authors of this paper is to observe the German Government’s rhetorical communication measurements during the 2008 financial crisis.

The authors compiled approaches of organizational rhetoric and pragma-linguistics first to offer a consistent concept and method for observation and analysis. Later on, they give an overview of the problem of trust and confidence according to Luhmann’s approach and its meaning for crisis rhetoric and marketing and managing approaches.

In the following case study, the authors offer a rhetorical text analysis, combined with a pragmatic perspective of accompanying legal measurements of the government as non-verbal communication. The authors show how the government re-established trust among German consumers and eventually overcame the crisis mainly by rhetorical action.

Regarding future crises, the authors suggest that the interaction of trust, financial markets and rhetorical approaches could be better understood. This could include both more quantitative research and qualitative rhetorical approaches.

Practical implications clearly show the importance of rhetorical education, especially for crises. This counts for governmental managers, as well as entrepreneurs and spokesmen.

The authors also revealed the problem of unjustified trust which can become dangerous for social welfare, even if it is only produced by misleading communication. This problem can only be solved by a careful public regulation.

Finally, the authors could describe the importance of effective language and communication as a tool for the German Government in the financial crisis in 2008. It can be also described as an example for decision-makers in similar situations.

This study aims to present current trends and developments in the field of communication management in The Netherlands. With the use of data obtained in 1999, the authors were able to identify trends and developments in the field and to compare these findings with studies conducted in the USA.

A total of 556 communication managers working in different parts of the industry responded and completed a questionnaire in 2005. Respondents were mainly heads of communication departments and were chosen by taking a random selection of 25 percent of all Dutch organizations with more than 50 employees. Members of the Dutch professional society, Logeion, also completed the survey.

The study's main areas of focus are: the size of communication departments, the glass ceiling for female professionals, and encroachment on communication positions. Findings show that the number of female professionals increased and balanced male professionals. Encroachment decreased compared with 1999.

Many studies report on trends and developments in the communication management or corporate communication profession. This study is unique because the authors compare its findings with those found in The Netherlands in 1999, enabling them to analyze developments over time. They also compare the Dutch situation with that in the USA.

Governments around the world have shown poor capabilities in responding effectively to the COVID-19 health emergency outbreaks. After the declaration of COVID-19 as an international pandemic by the World Health Organization on January 31, 2020, three countries experienced the greatest initial impact in Europe. Sequentially Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom (UK) were hit by the highest numbers of contagion and death in the first few months in Europe. The aim of this paper is to assess how information channels and sources influenced the public’s evaluation of the three government’s communication response strategies.

An online survey was conducted between March 14 and April 14, 2020, during the first wave of lockdowns and declarations of States of Emergency in the three countries.

Findings show particularities for the different countries, but also similarities in response and reactions of the public in the three scenarios. The response strategy of the UK Government was the most untrusted and criticized by citizens. In contrast, the Italian and Spanish Governments, which both chose to respond with the severest restrictions, attracted more support from citizens, especially in Italy, which was the first to close borders and impose lockdowns for the population.

Despite the national differences in the preference of information channels and sources, overall, an empirical relationship between government communication assessment and media use were found in all the scenarios.

This empirical study has theoretical and practical implications. Theoretically, findings will add evidence of implications of the Channel Complementary Theory to the field of risk, crisis and emergency communication. The results also provide insights for communication practitioners in the public sector on how forms of information and trust in sources influence the public’s assessment of authorities’ communication.

Implications for theory and empirical research about communication during a health pandemic are identified and discussed.

Citizens engage at a high level and synchronize their use of multiple media and platforms in all the three national scenarios.

Stronger criticism is provided by online media, especially social media and online press in the different national contexts.

Results corroborate that factors related to media choice need to be operationalized for risk and crisis communication research.

When public health depends on people understanding the actions they need to take, the possibility of disobedience is highly dependent on trust.

Compared with Spain and the United Kingdom (UK), trust in government institutions in Italy was stronger and could be explained by the higher use of owned media for information-seeking.

The purpose of this paper is threefold: to introduce a theoretical frame regarding the meaning of legitimacy as an intangible asset of the public sector; to test a way of operationalizing legitimacy typologies that allows exploring and comparing how citizens from two countries evaluate the legitimacy of public policies; and to suggest implications for governments’ legitimacy-building strategies in shared international crisis, such as the refugees coming from the Syrian region.

Building on Suchman’s typology, it was defined and categorized different types of legitimacy into concrete measurable, communication related statements concerning consequential, procedural, structural and personal. For the illustrative example, four focus groups were conducted in two different European societies as a mean to have two poles of comparison.

The paper reports current understanding of legitimacy by citizens, discusses how different legitimacy types might demand different communication and public diplomacy approaches. The basis for hypothesis for further research on how governments should build legitimacy during emerging societal issues such as immigration policies is set.

It proposes a typology and its operationalization, discusses how communication might shape legitimacy and profiles the challenge governments have in building it. Within a public diplomacy context, it brings clues for new strategies to the challenge of explaining policies on international crisis combining the tension of domestic with foreign publics.

There is little research so far in search for clues for communication strategies for the legitimacy of policies on the 2015 European refugee’s crisis. This contributes to the emerging area of intangible assets in the public sector and tests a focus-group research strategy with both hermeneutical and pragmatic aims. Combine public diplomacy theory with public sector intangible assets theory to respond to the tension of internal and external public demands.

Via the lens of the ego-depletion phenomenon (Baumeister et al., 1998) and Higgins' (1998) regulatory focus theory, this paper seeks to explain why current controlled communications are failing to achieve coherence between people's free will and their actions pursuing sustainable goals in a society. This paper explains how ego-depletion triggered by controlled communications can lead to confusion and decision fatigue in a society, thus potentially sabotaging people's participation in sustainable behaviour.

The authors applied Jaakkola's (2020) theory synthesis approach to integrate concepts from previously unconnected disciplines in order to generate novel insights in the area of controlled communication management.

The authors develop a theoretical framework and present research propositions that can help advance research and the discourse at the intersection of controlled communication and self-regulation theories.

This paper possesses the limitations associated with conceptual papers, e.g. the lack of empirical support of the study’s conceptual arguments.

This paper generates novel insights to assist communication practitioners and policymakers to improve vehicles and mechanisms of controlled communication with the public regarding sustainable goals pursuit.

To the best of authors' knowledge, this is one of the first papers that has merged the domains of self-regulation, ego-depletion, and controlled communication in an integrative framework in order to explain the mechanisms of how to enhance the effectiveness of controlled communication associated with sustainable goals pursuit.