Land Expropriation and Political Trust: A Spillover Effect

• In Event: Government Trust in China: Determinants, Trends and Methodology

Abstract

Existing studies of political trust find that public policy implementation affects political trust, and vice versa. This raises the concerns about endogeneity, a major challenge in these studies. The paper addresses this challenge in the context of land expropriation in China. Land expropriation and resulting inadequate land-taking compensation have become a touchstone of grievance and social unrest in rural China. This research examines how implementation of land expropriation affects political trust of ordinary citizens in their local government authorities in China. A two-round nationally representative survey that this study draws on enables us to examine before and after effects of land expropriation on political trust in a quasi-experiment setting where counties that had experienced land expropriation are treated as the treatment group and their geographically adjacent counties that had no experience of land expropriation as the control group. It finds that land expropriation when its resulting compensation is inadequately allocated has a negative spillover effect on political trust: not only land-losing villagers expressed a declined trust in their local authorities, as expected, the decline in trust also applies to those whose land was not expropriated in the treatment group while villagers in the control group exhibited no change in their trust in local authorities. The study contributes to a better understanding of political trust by demonstrating that public policy implementation has a contagious impact on political trust.

Authors

• Qi Zhang, Fudan University

• Meina Cai, University of Connecticut