Policy narratives and digital compliance: comparative governance during COVID-19 in Indonesia, Japan, and China
Abstract
Why do governments using broadly comparable digital governance technologies during the COVID-19 pandemic exhibit markedly different levels of observable digital compliance? Institutional capacity, technological capability, and regime characteristics help account for this variation, but they do not fully explain why similar interventions generated different trajectories as implementation unfolded. This article examines that puzzle through a qualitative comparison of Indonesia, Japan, and China, using a Most-Different Systems Design (MDSD) and a purposively constructed corpus of 45 government documents, media reports, civil society publications, and academic sources. Divergence was shaped less by the technologies themselves than by the ways official policy narratives evolved during implementation. Indonesia experienced increasing narrative fragmentation; Japan retained a relatively coherent narrative but showed limited adaptation; China combined centralized coordination with sustained narrative adaptation and consistently high observable administrative compliance. The findings suggest that institutional capability alone is insufficient to explain variation in observable compliance. What also matters is whether governing institutions can revise policy narratives as conditions change without losing sufficient coherence to sustain legitimacy. Governance legitimacy is treated here as an interpretive and institutional condition through which compliance may become durable or fragile, not as a directly measured behavioural outcome. The article extends the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) through the concept of Narrative Velocity, which captures the capacity of governing institutions to adapt official narratives while maintaining sufficient coherence to sustain legitimacy. Bringing temporal narrative dynamics into the implementation stage expands the explanatory reach of NPF in digitally mediated governance.