Public health leadership, preparedness, and governance at the front lines

Public officials can experience significant "backlash,” such as harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence, in response to policies that they develop and implement. Among the outcomes of backlash documented in this research are an inability to function effectively and high levels of personnel turnover. This project analyzes a case in which backlash was not uniform across or within states to identify the conditions under which it arose, its nature and impact and how public officials responded.

Answers to these questions contribute to the social science of crisis management and to the development of policies as we prepare for future epidemics or other potentially consequential population health threats.

Grounded in social science literature on institutional crisis response and backlash as social and political phenomena, this project develops a unique conceptual framework suggesting hypotheses to account for variation in the experience of crisis and backlash. To evaluate these hypotheses the project uses multiple sources of data: 150-200 key informant interviews with state and local health officials from all US states and two territories (these will be made available to researchers in a digital archive); a data set of social media posts from state legislators and governors; protest data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project and the Threats and Harassment Dataset.

Using these qualitative and quantitative data sets, the project takes a case-comparative methodological approach with several goals in mind: 1) to evaluate and refine the initial conceptual framework; 2) to test the project's initial hypotheses and suggest additional/new ones; 3) to identify in as much detail as possible lessons for public health officials and other authorities as they plan for the next major epidemic. This research is co-funded by the Science of Science: Discovery, Communications, and Impact and the Security and Preparedness Programs.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.