Political Trust and Trust in the Media in China and Germany

• In Event: Political Trust

Abstract

Trust in the media is often discussed in the backdrop of democratic polities. However, less is known about trust in the media in authoritarian governments. Do the factors that shape trust in the media in democratic societies play the same role in authoritarian polities? This is the question that motivates this research. We contend that political trust will play a central role in shaping levels of trust in the media in authoritarian states that have state-controlled media whereas political trust will be secondary to other factors such as generalized social trust in democracies without state-controlled media.

We propose to explain the variation in levels of trust in the media among Mainland Chinese and German citizens using data from the seventh wave of World Values Survey released in 2022. The proposed study tests explanations of media trust in China and Germany focusing on self-reported generalized social trust and education levels, and a novel theoretical argument that we have developed about the role that political trust plays in shaping levels of trust in the media. Using an ordered probit regression analysis combined with first differences analysis, we test these explanations for their relative power to predict levels of trust in the media in Germany and in China.

Authors

• Karl C. Kaltenthaler, University of Akron

• Yixuan Huang