Evaluation of COVID-19 governance in China: the effects of media use, pandemic severity, and provincial heterogeneity

ABSTRACT

This study applied a web survey to explore what factors explain Chinese residents’ evaluation of COVID-19 governance in China. The authors found that the use of official news sources and collectivist cultural orientation can explain more positive evaluations of government, but neither the actual nor perceived pandemic severity was directly associated with evaluations of government performance. Applying a multilevel analysis, two divergent effects were found associated with the severity of the pandemic: the positive rally effect and the negative attribution effect. In areas where the pandemic was particularly severe such as Hubei, the two divergent effects were especially evident.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• evaluation of government
• media use
• pandemic perception
• provincial heterogeneity

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. For more information about the online survey company ‘wjx.cn’, please visit its official website at https://www.wjx.cn.

2. According to official statistics, the annual urban disposal income per person in 2020 was 43,834 RMB and the average household size was 2.62 people. On this basis, estimated family income per month is 9,570 RMB (43,834*2.62/12), which is slightly lower than the medium income category in our web-survey sample (10,000–14,999). Data on urban disposal income is available at website of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China: http://www.gov.cn/guoqing/2021-04/09/content_5598662.htm.

3. According to the latest official statistics, China has a total population 1.41 billion (2020) and 93.5 million party members (estimated by the average of 91.9 million in 2019 and 95.1 million in 2021). The estimated percentage of the total population who are aged 18 or over and therefore meet the age requirements for party membership is 80.2% based on data of population distribution by age group in 2019 produced by Statista. From the above information, CPC party members account for approximately 8.3% of population aged 18 and over. Official data of the total Chinese population is available at http://www.stats.gov.cn/english/PressRelease/202105/t20210510_1817185.html. Information on party membership is available at http://politics.people.com.cn/BIG5/n1/2021/0701/c1001-32145418.html. The data of population distribution by age group is available at https://www.statista.com/statistics/1101677/population-distribution-by-detailed-age-group-in-china.

4. http://my-h5news.app.xinhuanet.com/h5activity/yiqingchaxun/index.html.

5. https://globaldatalab.org/shdi/shdi/CHN/?levels=1%2B4&interpolation=1&extrapolation=0&nearest_real=0.

6. The reason we classified the internet as traditional media is because it encapsulates all kinds of internet use before mobile apps and social media emerged in the last 15 years. Scholars now distinguish ‘the internet’ from ‘social media’by referring to the former as online platforms other than social media and the latter as new media that effectively integrates media and interpersonal communication (Han & Xu, 2020; Ho et al., 2015).

7. For more information about the Asian Barometer Survey, including the questionnaire and dataset, please visit the official website by http://www.asianbarometer.org.

8. An earlier version of this paper did include related hypotheses regarding media outlets, but the findings were sparse and inconclusive. At present, the literature on the influence of specific social media outlets on evaluation of government has not produced conclusive findings. Therefore, we decided to include this set of variables for control purposes only. Future research should seek to establish a more generalized understanding of the features of different social media outlets impact public attitudes.

9. We also tried an ordinal scale for the regression analysis. The results showed only trivial differences.

10. An earlier version of this paper included an analysis of the urban subsample. The result was nearly the same except for the negative and significant coefficient of foreign media.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the General Projects of Shanghai Social Science Fund [2019BXW007].