ABSTRACT Policy narratives, as a mobilization‐oriented communication strategy, are widely applied in public governance to enhance public understanding of and policy support. However, existing research lacks systematic empirical tests of whether policy narratives can effectively stimulate citizen coproduction behavior. To address this gap, this study employs disaster governance as the research context and develops an experimental design spanning three disaster phases: pre‐disaster, during‐disaster, and post‐disaster. The findings indicate that policy narratives significantly enhance citizens' willingness to engage in coproduction, primarily through the mediating effect of trust in government. Guided narrative plots and incentive‐based narrative strategies are more effective in strengthening trust in government and indirectly promoting coproduction. Public service motivation (PSM) is associated with heterogeneous effects of policy narratives on citizen coproduction, with individuals at different PSM levels exhibiting different responses to narrative types and disaster phases. The findings offer important implications for the design of disaster governance narratives and strategies aimed at enhancing citizen participation.
He et al. (Fri,) studied this question.