Moral Foundations, Ideological Divide, and Public Engagement with U.S. Government Agencies’ COVID-19 Vaccine Communication on Social Media

ABSTRACT

Guided by moral foundation theory, this study examined how moral framing interacted with local constituents’ ideological leaning to affect public engagement outcomes of government agencies’ COVID-19 vaccine communication on Facebook. We analyzed a dataset of over 5,000 U.S. government agencies’ Facebook posts on COVID-19 vaccines in 2021 (N = 70,671), assessed their use of moral language using a newly developed computational method, and examined how political divide manifests itself at the collective level. Findings from both fixed and random effects models suggest that: 1) the use of moral language is positively associated with public engagement outcomes on government agencies’ social media accounts; 2) five types of moral foundations have distinct effects on three types of public engagement (affective, cognitive, and retransmission); 3) moral foundations and local politics interact to affect public engagement, in that followers of government agencies in liberal states/counties prefer messages emphasizing the care/harm and fairness/cheating dimensions while those in conservative states/counties prefer the loyalty/betrayal dimension. The study demonstrates how a strategic employment of moral language can contribute to public engagement of government agencies’ mass communication campaigns.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at www.doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/M8Z3B

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at www.doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/M8Z3B.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/15205436.2022.2151919

Notes

¹ First, we obtained the list of government agencies’ names from usa.gov (https://www.usa.gov/federal-agencies) and used their name to search the Facebook archive (CrowdTangle). Not all agencies have active Facebook accounts, and some agencies may have Facebook names that are different from what are listed on usa.gov. Overall, our search identified 5,325 active public accounts that are verified by Facebook as government agencies. The sample contains government agencies at federal, state, county, and city levels.

² The full dictionary can be found at https://osf.io/ufdcz.

³ It should be noted that although scholars have suggested that liberty/oppression may be considered as a sixth foundation (Graham et al., 2013; Haidt, 2013), the dictionary used only considered five. Posts with a liberty framing (e.g., vaccination is an individual right), though occasionally present in the corpus, was not coded on this dimension but represented by the existing five dimensions.

⁴ https://www.ncsl.org/research/about-state-legislatures/partisan-composition.aspx.

⁵ https://github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data.

⁶ Some states and counties changed their reporting protocols during the COVID-19 pandemic, which led the state’s cumulative number of positive cases to reduce in some weeks. We excluded observations with negative numbers of weekly new cases from our regression models.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alvin Zhou

Alvin Zhou (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania) is an Assistant Professor at the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota. His research centers around computational social science and strategic communication (advertising, public relations, and organizations).

Wenlin Liu

Wenlin Liu (Ph.D., University of Southern California) is an Assistant Professor in the Jack J.Valenti School of Communication at the University of Houston. Her research focuses on social media-mediated disaster communication, multiethic community building, and social networks.

Hye Min Kim

Hye Min Kim (Ph.D., University of Southern California) is an Assistant Professor in the Communication Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her research focuses on the strategic use of social media for understanding and promoting health behaviors.

Eugene Lee

Eugene Lee (M.A., University of Minnesota) is a Ph.D. student in Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. Her research centers on emerging media and technology, organizational communication, and knowledge sharing networks.

Jieun Shin

Jieun Shin (Ph.D, University of Southern California) is an Assistant Professor in the College of Journalism and Communications at the University of Florida. Her research explores information diffusion on social media focusing on misinformation and news use.

Yafei Zhang

Yafei Zhang (Ph.D, University of Iowa) is an Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism at Renmin University of China. Her research focuses on strategic communication, social media, and computational communication.

Ke M. Huang-Isherwood

Ke Huang-Isherwood is a doctoral student at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and licensed lawyer in Minnesota. Her research focuses on social influence and gamification, particularly to foster political expression and civic participation.

Chuqing Dong

Chuqing Dong (Ph.D, University of Minnesota) is an assistant professor at the Advertising and Public Relations Department, Michigan State University. Her research focuses on public relations, corporate social responsibility, strategic communication in the nonprofit/government sectors, and digital media.

Aimei Yang

Aimei Yang (Ph.D, University of Oklahoma) is an associate professor of public relations in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. Yang’s research is positioned at the intersection of strategic advocacy, social-mediated networks, and civil society research.