Government Data Falsification, Correction, and Political Trust: An Experiment

• In Event: Poster Session: Politics of Post-Communist Countries & Politics and History
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Politics of Post-Communist Countries

Abstract

Many studies in political science argue that government performance is strongly associated with citizens’ trust in the political system. Since the Reform and Opening-up, one of the main pillars of the contemporary Chinese government’s rule has been economic growth, so Chinese officials have strong incentives to manipulate data related to it and superficially improve their performance. Meanwhile, both government and non-governmental actors have sought to correct these official economic data of China. The observation of the above governmental data falsification and its correction leads to several questions. First, do people believe in economic data provided by the Chinese government? Second, when people are informed of the correction of errors in those official data, do they lose trust in the Chinese government? Furthermore, will people’s pre-existing views about China’s economy and commitments to certain ideologies affect their belief in the corrective information and, by extension, their trust in the government? Do the sources of corrective information matter? To answer these questions, this study conducts an online survey experiment in China that investigates whether the levels of political trust differ among Chinese citizens due to their detection of the Chinese government’s economic data falsification.
Participants will be randomly assigned to one of five groups different from each other as for the received information about the economic data of China. My questions to measure the initial evaluation of China’s economy, nationalism, and liberalism will be given to every participant. The treatment conditions will require my subjects to read a short article about the economic performance indicator of China last year, i.e., Treatment 1. Those subjects in each of the three correction treatment groups need to read another short article that emphasizes the unreliability of economic figures in the previous article and is attributed to a news source, i.e., Treatment 1 + Treatment 2, Treatment 1 + Treatment 3, or Treatment 1 + Treatment 4. The control condition will assign participants to read a popular science article that explains the meaning of GDP. Subjects in the group with only Treatment 1 will also read an excerpt from the popular science article, which renders all the materials read by them nearly as long as those in other groups. Treatment 2 provides the corrective information that is attributed to the government itself. If subjects in Treatment 1 + Treatment 2 group believe in both conditions, they will regard Treatment 2 as an active genuine correction of a previous inadvertent mistake or technical failure in Treatment 1 and their trust in the government will not significantly decline. The correction information in Treatment 3 is from foreign sources and if subjects in Treatment 1 + Treatment 3 group believe in it, they will deem it exposure of deliberate falsification in official data. Hence, the fall of their trust in government will be relatively large and result from both the poorer updated economic performance and deception detection. Treatment 4 offers the corrective information that is attributed to participants’ fellow citizens. If subjects in Treatment 1 + Treatment 4 group believe in both conditions, they will also regard Treatment 4 as the exposure of deliberate falsification in official data and the decline of their trust in government will be large as well.
Although considerable doubt has been cast on China’s official economic data, my study is still innovative in systematically analyzing the political consequences of data falsification detected by the public and the mechanisms involved. Public discontent with the regime may lead to a breakdown in public order and the imperative to maintain social stability (weiwen) is increasingly crucial in superiors’ evaluation of their subordinates in the Chinese government, so officials have incentives to boost trust in the government by performing well. Hence, people in an authoritarian country like China are generally not so able to hold the incumbents accountable for their actions, but investigating the mechanisms and dynamics for the formation and transition of political trust under such a circumstance is still of particular significance.
My second potential contribution is to check respondents’ expressive responses by considering my subjects in groups with different subjective appraisals of the economic condition of China and different ideologies.
To summarize, the findings of my research may enrich the literature on the determinants of misperceptions and their corrections as well as those of political trust. In addition, it may provide new empirical support for the preservation of trust in government by proactively admitting mistakes and promoting or suppressing certain ideologies.

Author

• Shuli Zhang, University of Pittsburgh