From Epidemic to Pandemic: How Benchmarking Enhanced Trust in China during COVID

• In Event: Public Opinion Virtual Poster Session

Abstract

In the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak, China’s cyberspace was filled with outrage over the government’s mishandling. Four months into the crisis, however, public opinion surveys showed extraordinarily strong trust in the central government. Did the online outrage reflect widespread distrust in society? If so, what explains the regime’s spike of political standing in such a short time? We theorize that Chinese people did distrust the government for its poor response, but as the virus spread around the globe and many countries put up a mediocre performance, Chinese people began to assess government more generously. To test this international comparison theory, we collected original panel data about Chinese people’s opinions in February and March 2020. Our two waves of survey captured the critical transition of a China-only epidemic into a global pandemic. We merged the panel data with scraped data of daily deaths and embedded a survey experiment in the second wave for stronger causal inference. In support of our theory,we find in the first wave, political trust is negatively associated with daily new death numbers, but in the second wave, as the situation improved in China but deteriorated around the world, death numbers no longer mattered to political trust. The experiment pinpoints international comparison as the causal mechanism, favoring our theory over the rally ‘round the flag theory and the theory focused on the objective government performance.

Authors

• Shuai Jin, University of Massachusetts Boston

• Yingnan Joseph Zhou, University of Texas at El Paso