Digital Access and Local Government Trust: Is Contact an Effective Way to Improve Trust?

In the post-epidemic era, people’s activities are increasingly moving online, but the discussion on how local governments actively use the Internet to enhance people’s trust in government is relatively insufficient in existing studies.This paper examines the impact of individual Internet access on local government trust based on China family panel studies data, and innovatively introduces the“contact hypothesis”to test the effect of the government’s active Internet participation on improving local government trust. First, the benchmark results show that individuals who use the Internet have less trust in local government, on average than those who do not. Secondly, in order to alleviate the possible endogeneity, this paper uses historical fixed phone users and surface fluctuation as instrumental variables of whether an individual is online or not,as well as the PSM-DID method for estimation, and the results also confirm the findings in baseline regression. In addition, in the heterogeneity analysis, this paper finds that compared with the respondents who mainly used the Internet “for work” and “for business”, Internet digital access significantly reduces the trust of the “for social” and “for entertainment” groups in local government. Digital access to the Internet significantly reduce trust in local government among those with secondary education, compared with those with “no education” and those with “college, bachelor or above” degrees. Finally, through two clues of digital government affairs and government affairs Wiebo, this paper verifies that the government can effectively enhance trust by actively and effectively using the Internet to strengthen contact and communication with the public. The policy implications of this paper are that in the post-epidemic era when the Internet is more deeply embedded in people’s lives, the government should actively adapt to technological change, enhance interaction with the public, and enhance individual trust in local government.