Does the Medium Matter? Linking Citizens’ Use of Communication Platform for Information about Urban Policies to Decision to Trust in Local Government

Hyunkuk Lee

doi:10.3390/su13052723

Abstract

Information plays a formative role in citizens’ decision to trust their government. Given an increasingly diverse information environment, which is attributable to the diffusion of information and communication technologies (ICT)s, the Internet, and social media, we hypothesize that citizens’ use of a particular medium for information (online vs offline, and government source vs. non-government source) about their government plays an important and distinctive role in shaping citizens’ satisfaction with government information provision and trust in government. To address this central hypothesis, we analyze data from the 3068 citizen respondents. The findings of our study reveal that citizens’ use of the online medium for information about their government, such as information from local government web-media, lacks a strong relationship with their levels of satisfaction with government information provision and trust in government, while citizens’ use of different sources on the offline medium for information about their government, such as information from local government meeting or official gazette, is found to have a stronger association with citizens’ trust in government and satisfaction with government information provision.

Highlights

The increasing sophistication and diffusion of the Internet, social media and information and communication technology (ICT) into society has led many to believe that the way in which government information is disseminated to citizens may be undergoing fundamental changes [1,2,3]
The Internet has been adopted by private, non-government actors, which has stimulated the creation of a variety of new non-government channels of government information dissemination ranging from social media, to ‘wikis’, to political blogs, to online newspapers
We see that citizens’ use of private web media possessed no significant influence upon citizens’ levels of satisfaction with government information provision in the OLS estimate, but possessed a significant negative influence in the 3SLS model Taken together, these findings suggest that government online sources of information are not associated with making citizens feel more or less informed regarding the activities of their government but non-government online sources of information are negatively related to satisfaction with government information provision, though the magnitude of the association is very small

Summary

Introduction

The increasing sophistication and diffusion of the Internet, social media and information and communication technology (ICT) into society has led many to believe that the way in which government information is disseminated to citizens may be undergoing fundamental changes [1,2,3] For this reason, many scholars have begun to argue that the Internet and social media are restructuring citizen-state relationships, while the proliferation and increasingly widespread usage of terms such as e-government, e-democracy, e-participation, and the virtual state indicates they may be right [4,5]. They argue that levels of trust have been fairly consistent, but do oscillate) As such, this new technology has been championed by academics and practitioners as a means of heading off these ostensibly bleak trends by empowering government to better serve its citizens and foster greater interaction given the Internet’s potential to solicit greater citizen participation, facilitate more diffuse consumption of information, and at less of a cost to citizens and government [9,10]. With our survey data analysis from 3068 citizen respondents, we aims to link citizens’ use of communication platform for information about urban policies including urban sustainability initiatives to their decision to trust in local government

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Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion