This report draws on the 2025 Survey of Government Communicators among other sources of data and literature.
Delivering on the guidance and the Programme of Work of the OECD Public Governance Committee (PGC), the OECD Secretariat conducted the 2025 Survey of Government Communicators as a perception survey between June and October 2025. The survey targeted senior civil servants in communication departments (Directors of Communication, Heads of sector or similar, referred to througout the report as “government communicators”) across public administrations, and collected responses of 57 communicators from 25 OECD Member and Accession candidate countries and the European Commission (Table 1). Since virtually all government institutions and agencies have a communication function, the project team aimed to reach a maximum of three government communicators per country to capture the variety of perspectives and practices within countries, while avoiding over-representation of any one country in the sample. Respondents represent a wide range of ministries and institutions, with a large minority of respondents drawn from centres of Governmment and ministries responsible for Foreign and European Affairs, Climate and Environment, Finance and Economy, Health and Social Affairs, Interior and Justice, and Digitalisation and Public Administration.
This survey aimed to understand how government communication (also referred to in this report as institutional or public communication) has evolved in recent years, taking stock of the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, the advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the changes to the information ecosystem. As this was a perception survey, responses are not attributed to specific countries nor to individual respondents or their insitutions. They reflect perceived reailities and preferences of senior communicators, rather than verified comparable practices.
The survey was distributed through the OECD Public Communicators Network (PCN) contact points or Delegates to the OECD Working Party on Open Government (WPOG) who identified respondents in their administrations. Responses were collected via Microsoft Forms and Word documents and checked for consistency. When issues were identified, such as multiple selections in single choice questions, respondents were contacted to correct their answers. If no corrected response was provided, the problematic answer was excluded from the quantitative calculations for the affected question. All other valid responses from that respondent were retained.
The limitations of this survey that are factored into the analysis are the following:
As a perception-based survey, findings reflect the subjective views of individual respondents and may not always represent official national policy.
The survey sample does not include all OECD Member and Accession candidate countries, and may therefore not be fully representative of the varying levels of development and capacity of communication functions across the OECD.
Some questions had reduced sample sizes due to the exclusion of invalid or uncorrected responses in Word submissions.
Subjective ratings about proficiency or adoption of practices are not comparable between respondents as they are not verifiable against common objective metrics.