Impacts of Internet Use on Political Trust: New Evidence from China

ABSTRACT

This study evaluates the impacts of Internet use on political trust in China. Negative effects are consistently found across variant measures of political trust. IV and PSM estimations confirm that the negative impact is causal. Further, placebo tests show that the traditional media as the primary information source hasn’t generated such effects and trust in friends hasn’t been impacted by Internet use. This effect is most likely attributable to the fact that internet use in China exacerbates public perception toward government and government officials, increases public demand for political participation, and raises the expectation of government performance.

KEY WORDS:

• China
• internet
• IVs
• political trust

JEL:

• L86
• L82
• Z10
• Z13

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the Data and Research Center of Renmin University Bejing for sharing their data and our project is sponsored by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Project No. 71703100 and 71874051), the Humanities and Social Sciences Foundation of the Ministry of Education (Project No. 17YJCZH267), and Social Science Association of Hunan Province [No. 2016194]. Additionally, this research also received supports from Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s USC-SJTU Institute of Cultural and Creative Industry, and from Zizhu National High-Tech Industrial Development Zone, via the Zizhu New Media Management Research Center. We also appreciate all the insights shared by the two reviewers which are helpful for revising our paper. All mistakes are on our own. All the authors claim that there is no interest of conflict.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the here.

Notes

1. For example, the percentage of Americans who “always” or “most of the time” trusted the federal government to do what is right decreased from 73% in 1958 to a historically low level of 19% in 2015, according to the National Election Studies at the Pew Research Center, USA.

2. The latest CGSS data publicly available are the 2015 wave. However, it doesn’t provide information as comprehensive as the 2010 wave does, especially on the dependent variables we explore. Neither do the 2013 and 2012 waves. The content of the questionnaire has kept changing. Moreover, we have reviewed the adult datasheets of 2012–2016 CFPS (Chinese Family Panel Studies) which do not provide information needed for our study, either. The 2012 wave, though, did survey the respondents on trust toward governmental officials and friends. Consistently, we find a negative effect of internet use on trust toward governmental officials and insignificant effect on trust toward friends (see the supplementary material, available online).

3. Considering that health status could influence the frequency of utilizing internet and psychological status, we further control for health condition.

4. We only present partial estimated parameters for our control variables, and the full results are available upon request.

5. Provincial data on light usage in 2010 are obtained from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

6. We include five Categorical Perception Variables, that is, Social/Political Engagement, Government Resident Interaction, Political Comprehension, Poverty Alleviation, Political Supervision, and the definitions are shown in Table 5.