An Empirical Study On Correlation Between Media Contact And Political Trust

The research of political trust is a classical issue in academia. In general, if we want to study political trust as the dependent variable, it means that we research the people’s attitude of the political system. The attitude is affected by many aspects such as gender, age, place of residence, etc. As is known,we called them the demographic variables. Such as media contact, political efficacy, etc., they also affect the political trust. They are called the social and cultural variables. This research is based on the result of the "strengthen primary-level democratic administration survey,2011" which takes in Chinese mainland to study the correlation between the people’media contact and the political trust.Firstly, this article shows the descriptive analysis of the people’media contacts and their political trust. Secondly, this article shows the correlation between demographic variables, media contact and political trust. Finally, author makes media contact as the independent variable, political trust as the dependent variable, and the demographic variables as the control variables. Author makes these variables in an regression analysis. The study found is:Television is still the most dependent media channel by the persons; The people’s political trust can be divided into two levels, one is the upper ruling institutional trust, the other is the lower layer services institutional trust; For the traditional media, the relationship between the frequency of traditional media use and the upper ruling institution trust is positive correlation, but the relationship between the traditional media use and the lower layer services institution trust is not have a significant correlation; For the new media, no matter the upper ruling institution trust or the lower layer services institution trust, the frequency of the using the new media is all negative correlation for them. Based on the empirical study, this paper further explains the probable causes that make these phenomena occurred.This article shows that government should pay attention to the use of new media. The government should guide people’use of new media and strengthen the function of the spread of political information. So it can weaken the negative effects on political trust that takes by the use of new media.In general, we call them as the lower layer services institution, such as lower layer public officials, city/county government, the public security departments, court etc. The use of new media will negatively influence those departments’ political trust. We should focus on improving the ability of the government officials’ ability and occupational level, to optimize the process of policy implementation, striving to improve their work ability and work performance.