Lockdown, information quality, and political trust: An empirical study of the Shanghai lockdown under COVID-19

Abstract

Many countries have adopted various measures to curb the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. The regulation measures of lockdown have triggered changes in public political trust in the government (including in its competence, benevolence and integrity). Information shapes the attitudes and values of residents; this paper aims to study the effect of a lockdown on political trust and the moderating effect from quality of government shared information. From 12 March to 31 May 2022, Shanghai implemented strict lockdown measures. In this study, we randomly sampled the participation information of 1063 participants. Data-based regression analysis shows that lockdown has had a negative impact on all subcategories of political trust. However, timely and accuracy information weakens its negative effect. The accuracy of information moderates the relationship between lockdown and political trust in competence and integrity, while a sufficient supply of information moderates the relationship between lockdown and political trust in benevolence. Points for practitioners This study explores how different dimensions of information quality affect each component public’s political trust, and thereby inspires practitioners to strategically improve information communication in crisis.

How Do Information Resources Influence the Public Environmental Risk Perception? A National Survey in China

“…Meanwhile, the government is able to take effective risk solutions for environmental protection effects with the general public. Some studies found the positive relations between the information seeking behaviors and risk perception, but there is little consensus on the effective way to provide public with risk information exists [15]. Meanwhile, some scholars claims that there exist indirect associations between information resources and the public perception risk and thereby media are probably not a significant strong causal factor in risk perception.…”