Trust: The Essence of Good Policy Implementation
It is generally thought that legitimacy and policy success go hand in hand in a democracy. However, trust plays an important mediating role. In policies for controlling the COVID pandemic, citizens’ rights and policy success are in fact traded off: successful policies might need extensive monitoring of citizens, which violates their privacy and freedom. Generally, countries that intended to give citizens freedom and uphold their privacy ended up being unsuccessful at controlling the pandemic. For example the UK. On the other hand, countries that enforced successful policies have sacrificed citizens’ rights by extensive centralization and privacy intrusions. For example Taiwan. Despite the sacrifice of democratic values, however, citizens complied, without any strong dissent. How was this possible? Transparency and trust eased citizens’ fears and enabled Taiwan to secure their cooperation despite intrusion into their privacy. This cooperation helped the country achieve better health outcomes, with minimal compromise of freedom and privacy, at least as perceived by its citizens.
To control COVID, the UK and Taiwan used a variety of tools that ultimately imposed restrictions on people; their success varied based on the extent to which people’s privacy and freedom were curtailed. Taiwan, having experienced the SARS scare in 2003, was quick to institute a streamlined quarantine procedure for all foreign travelers, and ramp up mass testing. Even within the country, people were extensively monitored through mobile apps, and masks were enforced in all public places. Every building tested the temperature of each person entering it (Farr and Gao 2020). As a result, as of January 27th 2021, Taiwan has had only a total of 7 deaths because of the virus (Worldometer 2021a). The UK’s COVID policies brought different results, however. The UK imposed a lockdown beginning late March, which already made it 1–2 weeks late in terms of COVID response (Farr 2020). Mass testing replaced targeted testing only much later. Also, the UK’s contact tracing system was initially limited — possibly to protect privacy. As a result, the UK has suffered more than 100,000 deaths from 3.6 million COVID cases to date (Worldometer 2021b).
While Taiwan efficiently tapped its bioinformatics resources, the UK authorities, to safeguard privacy, lagged behind in getting the essential information to curb the pandemic. The UK National Health Service (NHS) decided to create a centralized database for health records only in late March (Gould, Joshi, and Tang 2020; Shead 2020). From their description, we can see that the citizen’s privacy is highly prioritized by the authorities — there is an entire section dedicated to addressing privacy concerns. On the other hand, Taiwan already had a centralized database that had everyone’s health records tied to their name. Doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals could easily access these details, including the individual’s travel history. Also, smartphone apps tracked people’s movement accurately and urgently alerted individuals who could have possibly been exposed to the virus (Farr and Gao 2020). Although some people are concerned about the availability of such real-time data to the authorities, they trust the Government to handle the data responsibly. This is what makes the difference between COVID management and mismanagement — trust.
Why did UK’s policies inculcate distrust, despite their attempt to protect freedom and privacy even at the cost of COVID mismanagement? The CNBC article explains the shortcomings (Farr 2020). First, political leaders were ambiguous in their messages to the citizens. There was confusion about whether or not it was mandatory to wear masks, or avoid travel and the like. This made local, individual decision-making difficult — people did not know whether they had to be masked on a bus, or whether they could hold small get-togethers. Moreover, leaders did not follow their own policies: several of them were caught disobeying the lockdown orders for reasons like meeting their girlfriend. One overlooked consequence of mishandling the pandemic was distributive injustice towards the people in old age homes and care centers. As the COVID cases in hospitals increased, the people in old age homes were distanced from healthcare to avoid risking exposure. Their access to healthcare systematically decreased, and more old members died because they could not get proper healthcare for other ailments than from COVID. This distributive injustice lay unnoticed by the authorities because older people are a minority that lack representation among COVID-management decision makers. The authorities therefore lacked knowledge of the consequence of their decisions, preventing them from taking corrective measures in time. The measures implemented were either too late, or faced limited citizen compliance. Seeing no success in COVID control, people’s trust in the Government decreased, leading to a vicious cycle of distrust, disobedience, and unsuccessful results.
What were the conditions in Taiwan that enabled the authorities to secure the trust of citizens — so much so that they were willing to compromise on freedom and privacy? Taiwan elaborately laid out tools that worked, not only to ensure compliance, but also to increase the trust in the Government. Farr and Gao (2020) describe the conditions: first, the social norms of mask-wearing and adhering to community health safety guidelines were in place ever since the SARS scare in 2003. In fact, the consequence of nonconformity was severe — violators would see their unmasked face all over social media should they be caught not wearing a mask in public. This opportunity to punish defectors through social sanctions by peers, coupled with the extensive Government framework of rules, gave citizens the assurance that everyone in the country would follow the guidelines, in which case it was in their best interest to follow all the guidelines as well. Also, leaders practiced what they preached: there were no exceptions to rules. Everyone in Taiwan had to follow them, from political leaders to ordinary citizens. Interestingly, while other countries faced a problem when citizens began hoarding personal protection kits, Taiwan prevented this information cascade in an efficient manner. The mask inventory system gave citizens real-time data on the stock of masks in different locations, enabling them to pre-order masks and efficiently procure them from places that had enough stock. In essence, Taiwan laid out transparent guidelines and information to its citizens, increasing their trust in the Government in addition to the mutual trust that everyone else too would follow the rules.
The effectiveness of trust comes through strongly in the case of two weaker parts of Taiwan’s strategy — a top-down approach in management and extensive monitoring — which still secured enthusiastic local compliance. Taiwan relied on a top-down approach through centralized planning. The strategy as well as the data that was required to implement the strategy (the centralized health database) was entirely decided by the central government (Farr and Gao 2020). Local knowledge had almost no role to play. Also, Taiwan continued to extensively monitor its citizens even in the presence of strong social norms. The authorities imposed heavy fines on unmasked individuals and made multiple (online) visits in a day to people under quarantine (Farr and Gao 2020). Decision-making and monitoring of this sort would otherwise crowd out civic virtue and decrease citizen compliance. But in the case of Taiwan, it did not. These point to the power of trust: it can secure compliance even where it is otherwise limited. To prevent the failure of trust, the authorities took small but important steps. For example, quarantined people were repeatedly thanked for doing their duty as Taiwanese citizens (Farr and Gao 2020). States have to rely more on laws than norms, which crowds out the intrinsic motivation to comply. But messages like this essentially convert the law to a norm: following the law of staying in quarantine is the correct thing to do because the individual is upholding the norm of being a good citizen. Through repeated communication (daily briefings), the authorities made sure to mention that they trust locals (Farr and Gao 2020). The locals reciprocated by trusting the authorities back. This trust was powerful enough to control the pandemic.
The trust in the Taiwan government not only prevented the lack of social compliance, but also eased fears about the compromise of privacy, which could have fomented strong dissent. The Taiwan government upheld people’s trust by implementing policies that worked extremely well. The UK sought to maintain its citizens’ privacy and freedom, but the resulting failure to implement an empirically responsible strategy ultimately led it to compromise freedom and privacy: it had to sell its data to foreign companies to research and come up with a solution that would control the pandemic (Shead 2020). Truly, trust improves outcomes for all.
References:
Farr, Christina, and Michelle Gao. 2020. “How Taiwan beat the coronavirus.” CNBC, July 15, 2020.
Worldometer. 2021a. “Taiwan Coronavirus Cases.” Accessed January 27, 2021.
Worldometer. 2021b. “United Kingdom Coronavirus Cases.” Accessed January 27, 2021.
