Government Information Disclosure And Government Trust In Environmental Risk

Occurrence of environmental risks results in loss of life and property of people, which brings negative social benefit, and to realize cooperation of the public and government is an effective way to improve the effectiveness of environmental risk management. At present, problems exist that government information disclosure is not timely, comprehensive and that people don’t trust in government, which block cooperative public participation. This paper is aimed at to seeking for intrinsic motivation of government risk information disclosure and formation of government trust. In this paper, theories of public choice and public participation are applied, aimed at improving government actions through incentives to optimize information disclosure, and to enhance public trust in the government. The main contents are as follows:Firstly, in government information disclosure issue, a game model between government and the public is established to research intrinsic motivations in information disclosure and to analyze the interactions between government information disclosure and public participation. Study conclusions:i) for the environmental risks people can cope with the government choose to disclose the information, but for the environmental risks difficult for people to deal with, the government chose not to disclose information; ii) when people can’t cope with environmental risks, government information is not disclosed for the reason that risk response measures taken by the government (or not taken) remains the same while not to disclose the information avoids direct and indirect costs of government; iii) when the people themselves can improve risks addressing results public participate will happen, and government will disclose the information; when people themselves cannot make better risks addressing results through participating in, at some circumstances, public participation and information disclosure promote mutually.Then, to understand how government action affects government trust, the formation of trust in government was analyzed. In trust in government issues, a view of "people’s perception of government’s trustworthiness determines trust in government" is summarized, and specific performances of government trustworthiness in environmental issues are analyzed. In this empirical study of 102 samples, citizens are selected as the research object and SPSS 16.0 is applied. Study results show that there are positive correlations between trust in government and government’s resources and reserves, the effect of expert involvement, the effect of social accountability and government’s existing environmental performances; what’s more, trust in government has no correlation with evaluation mechanism’s reasonableness for government.