Perceived local government performance and people’s life satisfaction: the role of trust in local government and political participation

ABSTRACT

Life satisfaction (LS) has received widespread attention, but few studies explored the determinants of people’s LS in China from the perspective of perceived performance of local government (PPLG). Therefore, taking trust in local government and political participation into consideration, this study employed the data in 2021CSS to analyse the relationship between PPLG and LS. The results showed that PPLG had a direct positive relationship with people’s LS. Citizens’ trust in local government played a mediating role in this relationship. That is, PPLG had a significant positive association with citizens’ trust in local government, which in turn had a significant positive relationship with people’s LS. Unexpectedly, institutional and non- institutional political participation played different roles, namely, institutional political participation rather than non-institutional political participation played a mediating role in this model. The conclusions provided a meaningful supplement for related studies, but some potential limitations require further discussion.

KEYWORDS:

• Perceived performance
• local government
• trust in local government
• institutional political participation
• non-institutional political participation
• life satisfaction

Acknowledgments

Data used were from Chinese Social Survey (CSS) in this research, originally collected by Institute of Sociology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. The author (s) appreciates the assistance in providing data of 2021CSS.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The raw data that support the findings of this study are openly available in official website of Chinese Social Quality Data Archive at http://csqr.cass.cn/DataExplore/, reference number 2021CSS. And data in this study can be obtained by connecting with the corresponding author.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/03003930.2024.2352504

Ethical approval

This article does not contain any studies with human participants performed by the author.

Notes

1. China’s State Council Information Office. ‘Poverty Alleviation: China’s Experience and Contribution’ (2021). Arrived at https://www.gov.cn/zhengce/2021–04/06/content_5597952.htm

2. The Government of the People’s Republic of China. ‘Constitution of People’s Republic of China’ (2018), Arrived at https://www.gov.cn/guoqing/2018–03/22/content_5276318.htm

3. OECD (2022). Building Trust to Reinforce Democracy: Key Findings from the 2021 OECD Survey on Drivers of Trust in Public Institutions. Arrived at https://www.oecd.org/governance/trust-in-government/

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Social Science Fund of China [Grant number 22BSH132]; Philosophy and Social Science Fund of Heilongjiang Province, China.