How Do Citizens Trust Government Performance Information? ——Survey Experiments From The Perspective Of Information Consistency

Evaluation of government performance and disclosure of performance information are important means to improve government transparency and public accountability,which is conducive to the government to win the recognition of stakeholders,especially the public,to enhance the legitimacy of the government.The external role of performance information report and disclosure has a logical premise that can not be ignored,that is,the public as the recipient of information should trust the published performance information.When the government and its external third-party institutions simultaneously release the government performance information for the same evaluation object,it is a problem that must be considered in the practice of government performance information disclosure whether the consistency of the evaluation results of both sides will affect the expected utility of the performance information report.Existing studies on the relationship between information sources and credibility of government performance information haven’t paid attention to the impact of information consistency,and lack empirical exploration in the context of China.This study adopts the survey experiment method and implements two independent experiments through the online platform to explore the influence factors of the public trust on government performance information,and uses statistic technology including t-test,ANOVA and regression analysis to test hypotheses.The results show that the public’s trust in government performance information from the same source is not invariable,and the consistency of government performance information from the external source will affect the public’s trust in government performance information.Study 1 found that the consistency of dual-source information would enhance public trust in government performance information.When the performance information from the government source is consistent with the performance information from the third party,the public’s trust in the performance information from the government source is higher than that from the government source alone,and the low performance information corroborated by the third party is easier to win the public’s trust than the high performance information.Study 2 found that when the performance information from government sources conflicts with that from third-party sources,the public will change their trust choice according to the relative reporting performance level.On the one hand,when there is a significant difference in performance information between the two sources,the public generally trusts the party reporting a lower level of performance.On the other hand,whether the information source is the government or a third party,the public trusts the relatively low performance information provided by the information source subject more than the relatively high performance information provided by the information source subject.The research results to some extent confirm the existence of anti-public-sector bias in the context of China,which makes the effectiveness of government performance information disclosure full of challenges.This study expands theories of government performance information management in the context of China from the perspective of behavioral public administration,and provides enlightenment for the practice of government performance information disclosure and the interaction with third-party evaluation agencies.