The Effect of the\n EU\n ‐Brand on Citizens’ Trust in Policies: Replicating an Experiment

Abstract

Karens et al. (2016) conducted an experiment to measure the effect of the European Union (EU) brand on citizens’ trust in policies. Experiments conducted with economics students in Belgium, Poland, and The Netherlands showed a consistently positive and significant effect of applying the EU brand, on trust in the policies. This study presents seven replications conducted several years after Karens et al.’s experiments. The replications show no significant effects of the EU brand on trust in policies. These findings demonstrate that brand effects may vary over time. To identify a population effect size across all experiments, a meta-analysis was conducted. The meta-analysis shows that—overall—the EU-brand has a small but significant positive effect on citizens’ trust in policies. The article tests earlier findings, and discusses intricacies of conducting replications. It elaborates explanations for the results in the replications, and the replication problems with experiments based on evaluative conditioning. Evidence for Practice • Brands of public organizations have the ability to influence citizens’ perceptions of the organizations’ policies. • The effect of a public brand may vary over time, and even become non-significant during certain periods. Therefore, it is important to measure the impact of your brand longitudinally, instead of only once in time. The Importance of Replications in Public Administration Public administration research has seen an upsurge of experimental research (e.g., Grimmelikhuijsen et al. 2017; James, Jilke, and van Ryzin 2017). This has helped the discipline to better study a wide range of causal effects, e.g., causal effects of public brands (Alon-Barkat and Gilad 2017; Teodoro and An 2017), red tape (Wesley and Tummers 2017), and cultural stereotypes in applicant-assessment (Baekgaard and George 2018). The Importance of Replication However, following concerns in the wider social sciences about the robustness and replicability of findings in experimental research (Braver, Thoemmes, and Rosenthal 2014; Open Science Collaboration 2015), concerns about replicability of experiments have been raised in PA as well (Walker, James, and Brewer 2017). Context and timing are important in the field of public administration, which may create extra limitations in terms of replicability of experiments in PA research (Walker, James, and Brewer 2017). This raises questions about validity of earlier experimental research in PA, and calls for replication studies (Pedersen and Stritch 2018). Replications are important for checking the validity of previous studies, and establishing the generalizability of findings to different populations and contexts (Klein et al. 2014; Pedersen and Stritch 2018; Schmidt 2009; Walker, James, and Brewer 2017). Nosek and Lakens (2014) explain that replications: 1. add data to increase precision of the effect size estimate via meta-analysis, and help to identify false positive research findings; 2. help to establish generalizability of effects, i.e., establish whether the sample, setting, and procedures that are assumed irrelevant in an experiment, are irrelevant indeed; 3. can help to identify boundary conditions for effects if they produce negative results. This article presents the replication of an experimental research through evaluative conditioning with public brands. The original research was conducted by Karens et al. (2016). Evaluative conditioning pertains to changes in the evaluation of a stimulus (a policy in our case) as a result of merely pairing it with another positively or negatively perceived stimulus (the EU brand in our case) (Martin and Levey 1978; see also Alon-Barkat and Gilad 2017). Jasper Eshuis