Media or political affiliations? Political transition, government trust, and affective polarization in South Korea

Predictors of confidence and trust in government and institutions during the COVID-19 response in Australia

This study analyzes how citizens' satisfaction with governance values and perceived government performance affect public trust in government in China and South Korea and explores its implications for building resilient communities. The results of the study show that the level of satisfaction with democratic governance values and the government's performance in dealing with political corruption, the economy, and human rights are all significantly associated with trust in government in China. Government performance in dealing with political corruption and the economy is significantly associated with trust in government in South Korea as well. Government officials' attention to citizen input is significantly associated with trust in local government in both countries. Trust in people was significantly associated with trust in government in China only. Finally, implications of the study findings for building resilient communities and future research agendas are discussed.

Based on the Asia Barometer Survey of 2003, 2004, and 2006, government performance, citizen empowerment, and citizen satisfaction with self‐expression values are associated with public trust in government in Japan and South Korea. This study finds, first, that government performance on the economy, controlling political corruption, the quality of public services, crime, and attention to citizen input are significantly associated with broad public trust in government in both Japan and South Korea. Likewise, citizens’ satisfaction with their right to gather and demonstrate and to criticize the government is closely connected to trust in central and local governments in Japan. In South Korea, citizens’ satisfaction with their right to gather and demonstrate is intimately linked to trust in local government. Implications for government leadership to enhance performance, transparency, citizen participation, and public trust in government are analyzed and elaborated upon in this insightful study.

Government websites and social media's influence on government-public relationships

Care, competency, or honesty? Framing emergency preparedness messages and risks for nuclear energy in Singapore

Introduction

What political party or what presidential candidate a person supports is often used by adults to divide their social world. However, little is known about whether young children also engage in such tendencies or whether political groups are even socially meaningful for young children. To trace the beginnings of these tendencies, the present study investigated whether 6- to 12-year-old U.S. children use political markers, such as political party affiliation and support for presidential candidates, to guide their social preferences. We also examined children's ability to report their political affiliation, whether their political affiliation matched their parents', how accurate they are at reporting their parents' political affiliations, and whether having parent-child conversations about politics predicted children's political affiliation and social preferences. We found that children as young as 6 years of age showed ingroup preferences for individuals who shared their own or their parents' political affiliations-especially based on support for presidential candidates. Notably, even if children could not report their own presidential candidate choice or were inaccurate at predicting their parents' presidential candidate choice, children still preferred people who supported the same presidential candidate as their parents. Further, children who had conversations with their parents about politics were more likely to prefer people who matched their parents' political affiliations. This study provides the first empirical evidence that 6- to 12-year-old children are using political markers to form ingroup preferences and show rudimentary forms of political partisanship. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

There are frequent calls to enhance citizens' trust in government to pave the way towards a new paradigm of participatory governance and strong citizen support for government. In various realms, citizens may directly or indirectly engage with the government through various available mediums, even though, despite the availability of various policies and services provided by the government, citizens are generally passive and adamant in trusting the public sector. While many studies have explored a set of determinants that influence citizens' trust in government (i.e., central government, local government, parliament, and the legal system), few studies have ascertained the relationship and the role of social trust, happiness, governance, and political systems. These are critical factors that may influence trust in government. To address this gap, this study draws on the theoretical lens of social capital theory, proposing that cognitive social trust and citizen happiness—environment and performance—are the most likely predictors of citizen trust in government. This study assumes that citizens' perceptions of governance and political systems will moderate the effect of social trust and happiness on trust in government. Using data from the Asia Barometer Survey 2007, and focusing on data collected from the Philippines, this study tests a latent model employing the structural equation modelling technique. It finds that happiness negatively predicts trust in the central government and the legal system, while all other predictors do not have a significant effect. The findings also show that the political system moderates the impact of social trust and happiness on trust in government. Finally, this article points out its theoretical, empirical, and practical implications and provides directions for future research.

E-government can be a useful tool for governments to improve relationships with their citizens. However, citizen trust in government and the Internet technology is necessary for broad adoption of e-government. Using a survey, this study examines the trust level of digital natives in Nepal in their government and the Internet technology in general. The trust level in government comprises both relational trust and institutional trust and the relational trust is subdivided into three aspects: competency, benevolence, and integrity. This study also investigates respondents Internet and social media usage behavior and their likelihood to adopt e-government if social media is used in government-citizen communication. Results show that respondents have a low level of competence and benevolence trust in Nepalese government whereas their level of integrity and institutional trust in government was extremely low. Although respondents generally used the Internet and social media more than four hours a day, most have not used or seldom used e-government websites. Respondents' positive attitude towards government's presence on social networking websites provides an excellent opportunity for Nepalese government to harness the potential of social media. To supplement the views of digital natives, two business website owners and two government officials in Nepal were also interviewed. Interviewees were positive of the benefits the Nepalese government could gain by being presence on social media, especially in terms of promoting transparency. Some also suggested that Nepalese government needs to consider developing e-government applications in local language.

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.

The ability of governments to maintain power significantly relies on their capacity to manage information flow to the public. While these governments have traditionally controlled conventional media, the rise of social media has presented new challenges. This study uses representative survey data to examine how different social media platforms, specifically Facebook and VKontakte, influence public trust in central and local government in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Georgia. Research has shown that in these contexts, Facebook tends to carry counter-government messaging, whereas the Russian platform VKontakte disseminates pro-government content. This divergence leads to differing relationships between trust in government based on platform usage. Our results show that Facebook usage is negatively associated with trust in central and local government in these countries, while VKontakte usage generally has the opposite effect. Our findings highlight the importance of understanding the nuanced roles that social media platforms play in shaping political attitudes and trust in government in former Soviet countries.

PurposeThis study examined the association between media consumers' attitudes toward COVID-19-related content on mainstream, on-demand and social media and trust in the government's ability to handle the pandemic crisis.Design/methodology/approachThe study is based on an online survey of a representative sample of 1,005 Israelis aged 18 and over and focused on consumers' perceptions of media contents as a source of information, social solidarity, criticism and anxiety.FindingsFindings indicate that mainstream media were the primary source of pandemic information. A positive association was found between perceptions of mainstream media as a source of criticism and trust in government's actions. This association was negative regarding social and on-demand media. The more mainstream media contents were perceived as anxiety evoking, the lower participants' trust in government's actions. A positive association was found between perceptions that social media encouraged social solidarity and trust in governmental action.Practical implicationsPolicymakers should take into consideration that various media operate synergistically to continually construct reality.Originality/valueThis study focuses on consumers' perceptions of COVID-related media contents, which are especially important in the current era of media outlet proliferation, distribution and impact on the government. The unique contribution is in the integrated application of media malaise theory, virtuous circle theory and echo chamber theory to explain the correlation between media consumption and public trust during a global crisis in the era of diverse media outlets.Peer reviewThe peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-06-2021-0299.

This panel is designed to respond to recent calls for research on the deeper understanding about the antecedents of citizens’ adoption of e-government and e-participation services and consequences of e-participation, and citizens’ digital engagement behaviors. Specifically, Kim and Lee raise a question of what e-government promotion and marketing strategies and tools for increasing e-government awareness actually leads to citizen's use of e-government. To answer this question, they focus on widely-used e-government awareness promotion strategies and tools such as advertisements on Internet banner, outdoor banner, mass media, brochure/booklets, and social media and their associations with three representative e-government services – weather services, tax filing services, and online petition and discussion services. Using a National Survey of E-government Usage in 2017, they report preliminary findings, discuss the theoretical and policy implications of the findings, and offer future research. Song and Lee's research primarily address a question of how and why e-participation shapes the relationships among citizens’ community engagement behaviors and their perception of public values such as transparency and citizen trust in government. To address the question, they collected survey data of Seoul residents in 2019 and employ structural equation modeling to test the relationships among citizens’ use of e-participation, community engagement behaviors, and perceived trust and transparency in government. The preliminary findings will be reported and discussed to draw their implications for policy makers and public managers as well as for e-government literature. Shi and her colleagues’ research shifts its focus to ongoing issues around citizens’ willingness to share data. In their study, Shi and her colleagues ask a question of whether citizens are more willing to share their data with government agencies or corporations in China. Using Motorbike sharing APP as a case, they use a vignette survey and design a 2 by 2 factorial experiment to investigate the research question. The effects of sector difference on citizens’ willingness to share data is studied by manipulating two factors at once: sector difference (sharing data with government agency versus with corporation), and price for using the APP (high price versus low price). Shi and her colleagues report preliminary findings and discuss their implications.

The conflict in Hong Kong in 2019 again emphasizes young people's trust in government is important. E-government is usually regarded as a tool to improve the levels of trust in government. With the development of Information and Communication Technology in China, social media becomes important channels to provide e-government services. This study investigates whether individual experiences of e-government use via social media can influence the levels of trust in government among young generation. The findings, which based on a survey of 1000 undergraduate students in Chongqing, offer support to a positive relationship between this e-government use via social media and public trust in government. Particularly, e-information service use via social media are linked with greater trust in government in competence and benevolence dimensions. On the other hand, e-transactional service use shows negative impacts on political trust. These results suggest that public sectors in China should improve the qualities of e-government services and create more services contents on social media platforms.

Risk perception research, targeting the general public, necessitates the study of the multi-faceted aspects of perceived risk through a holistic approach. This study aimed to investigate the association between the two dimensions of risk perception of COVID-19, i.e., risk as a feeling and analysis, trust in the current government, political ideologies, and socio-demographic factors in South Korea. This study used a year-long repeated cross-sectional design, in which a national sample (n = 23,018) participated in 23 consecutive telephone surveys from February 2020 to February 2021. Most factors differed in the magnitude and direction of their relationships with the two dimensions of risk perception. However, trust in the current government, alone, delineated an association in the same direction for both dimensions, i.e., those with a lower level of trust exhibited higher levels of cognitive and affective risk perception. Although these results did not change significantly during the one-year observation period, they are related to the political interpretation of risk. This study revealed that affective and cognitive risk perceptions addressed different dimensions of risk perception. These findings could help governments and health authorities better understand the nature and mechanisms of public risk perception when implementing countermeasures and policies in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and other public health emergencies.