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Abstract
Background: During protracted public health emergencies, statutory mandates rely fundamentally on sustained voluntary civic compliance. Executive crisis messaging, however, may exhibit pronounced volatility through abrupt shifts in regulatory terminology, ambiguous threat appraisals, and contradictory economic-epidemiological rationales. This study investigated how policy framing volatility affected community mobility compliance across successive administrative restriction regimes in Indonesia from 2020 to 2023.
Objective: To estimate the relationship between policy framing volatility and community mobility compliance across Indonesian provinces and determine whether communication volatility moderated the compliance-generating effect of formal policy stringency.
Methods: A weekly dynamic panel dataset covering 34 provinces observed across 146 consecutive weeks (N = 4,964 jurisdiction-week observations) was constructed. The framework combined the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker, Google Community Mobility Reports, and a Policy Framing Volatility Index based on semantic cosine distance across 1,842 official press briefings and regulatory decrees. Two-step System Generalized Method of Moments estimation used Windmeijer finite-sample standard-error corrections and collapsed instrument matrices.
Results: A one-standard-deviation increase in policy framing volatility reduced mobility contraction by 3.824 percentage points (95% CI 2.946–4.702; p < 0.001), indicating premature community movement. The interaction between policy framing volatility and the Stringency Index was negative (−0.042; p < 0.001). Compliance erosion was greater in retail and recreation (elasticity −0.514) and transit stations (−0.448) than in workplaces (−0.285). Diagnostic tests yielded Arellano–Bond AR(1) z = −5.42 (p < 0.001), AR(2) z = 0.94 (p = 0.348), and Hansen J-test χ²(40) = 46.28 (p = 0.265).
Conclusion: Policy framing volatility can decouple statutory executive mandates from population compliance. Sustained public adherence during prolonged crises requires stable messaging, unified scientific communication channels, and scheduled transition notices rather than reliance on escalating punitive sanctions alone.
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