The Influential Factors Of Government Trust

Government trust refers to the willingness of citizens to accept bad outcomes because they have positive expectations of the government’s goals and actions,regardless of whether they have the means to monitor the government.Government trust is the basis of the benign interaction between government and citizens.In the present era,the research on the influence factors of government trust,especially government trust,has become an important topic.The participation theory holds that the main reason for public distrust of government is the low level of government transparency,but the empirical study on the relationship between transparency and government trust has not been conclusive,the reason is that there are some confounding variables(valence of policy result and information frame)in the existing research on the effect of transparency on government trust,which leads to the explanation of research conclusion is not unique.Therefore,in experiment 1,the effects of transparency,policy outcome valence and information framework on government trust are further explored by separating them.In addition,the official media used by the government to enhance transparency included government websites and government social media accounts,since experiment 1 used images of government websites as background material,in real life,people access information more through social media,and research using questionnaires has found that,different ways of information release may lead to different ways of publicity of similar information content to produce different publicity effects.But the above research confuses the information content factor when changing the information publication way,causes under the different information publication way the content also to have the difference.Therefore,experiment 2 further controlled the consistency of information,presenting the same information in two different official media(government websites and government social media accounts),and examined the effect of official media types on government trust.Experiment 1 examined the effects of transparency(high transparency,low transparency),valence of policy outcome(positive outcome,negative outcome)and information framework(positive framework,negative framework)on government trust(competence dimension,honesty dimension,benevolence dimension).The results show that the main effect of transparency and information framework is not significant in government trust,while the main effect of policy outcome valence is significant in government trust,moreover,the triple interaction of transparency,policy outcome valence and information framework is significant in government trust,and the main effect of transparency is not significant in the three dimensions of government trust,the main effects of policy outcome valence and information framework are significant in the dimension of government trust competence,but not significant in the dimension of honesty and benevolence,the triple interaction of transparency,policy outcome valence and information framework is significant in competence dimension,but not significant in honesty dimension and benevolence dimension.As the results of experiment 1 show that the interaction among transparency,policy outcome valence and information framework is significant in the government trust index,and it can be obtained in the case of high transparency and negative outcome after concrete analysis,the main effect of information frame is significant,so the experiment 2 only discussed the influence of information frame and official media type on government trust when introducing the factor of official media type.Specifically,experiment 2 looked at the effects of high transparency and negative outcomes,the influence of information framework(positive framework,negative framework)and official media type(government website,government social media accounts)on government trust(competence dimension,honesty dimension,benevolence dimension).The results show that the main effect of information framework is significant in government trust,while the main effect of official media type and the interaction between them are not significant in government trust,the main effect of information frame is significant in the dimension of government trust competence,but not significant in the dimension of honesty and benevolence,and the main effect of official media type is not significant in the three dimensions of government trust,moreover,the interaction between information framework and official media types is not significant in the three dimensions of government trust.The study concluded the following:1.Transparency,the valence of policy results and the information framework together affect citizens’ perceived government trust and only affect the competence dimension of government trust.In particular,under the condition of high transparency and negative results,the competence dimension of citizens’ perceived government trust is higher when using positive frame than negative frame.Therefore,when a negative event occurs and citizens have a high demand for government transparency,the government may consider using a high level of transparency and positive description of the negative event.2.The type of official media has no effect on the trust of the government.The government website and the government social media account are used to present the information of policy results,there is no significant difference among the three dimensions of government trust,which indicates that the two disclosure tools have the authority and reliability of information release.