自然灾害与政治信任:基于汶川大地震的自然实验设计

Natural Disaster and Political Trust:A Natural Experiment Study of the Impact of Wenchuan Earthquake

在当代中国,自然灾害如何在短期内影响公众的政治信任,其作用机制如何?本文使用在汶川大地震发生前后收集的调查数据,试图通过自然实验设计来回答上述问题。本研究发现:在时间维度上,外生的自然灾害会在短时间内提升公众的政治信任;在结构上,地震对公众政治信任的边际增长效应呈现差序性特征,即对区县政府政治信任的正向作用最强,而对中央政府政治信任的强化作用最弱。在此过程中,国家主导的媒体宣传起到了关键的中介作用,即公众接收官方媒体信息的频率越高,其政治信任在短时间内提升的幅度越大。研究表明,灾后短期内的政府动员与鼓舞性的媒体议程设置是提升公众政治信任的重要影响因素,但从长远来看,切实加强政府的长效治理能力建设始终是巩固政治合法性的关键。

How do natural disasters impact political trust in contemporary China and what is the causal mechanism?Existing literature indicates that severity of disaster,government relief effort and information dissemination are the three key factors influencing people’s political trust in the context of acute natural disasters.This study uses Wenchuan Earthquake as a natural experiment and focuses specifically the survey data collected right before and after the quake.It finds that largely due to the“rally round the flag”effect and massive media coverage,political trust of government officials at all levels rises significantly post-disaster.During the crisis,state-owned and-controlled media played a vital intermediate role.The more a citizen is exposed to the official media coverage,the more likely his/her political trust spikes.However,the division of work in disaster relief among different levels of government results in different degree of trust increase.As county-level governments are often directly responsible for rescue and post-earthquake relief,they gain the highest increase of political trust while central-level officials the smallest.The short-run jump of political trust recedes as time goes by.Government mobilization and media coverage are important contributing factors to the political trust spike in post-disaster time.Nevertheless,the key to consolidate political legitimacy lies in long term effort to build good and effective governance.