Asian Perspective Preprint 2021 Xiaoxiao Meng (Forthcoming)

This is a preprint of an accepted article scheduled to appear in a forthcoming issue of Asian Perspective. It has been copyedited but not paginated. Further edits are possible. Please check back for final article publication details.

News Media Effects on Political Institutional and System Trust: The Moderating Role of Political Values

Xiaoxiao Meng and Shuhua Zhou

This paper explores the correlation between media effects and political trust, as well as the moderating factor in the equation. Specifically, the authors measured political trust within two categories: institutional trust and system trust. Analyses were based on two waves of surveys conducted among Internet users (2014: N = 2,970; 2017: N = 2,379) in China. Results indicated that (a) exposure to official media was positively correlated with political trust, whereas exposure to individual media and overseas media were negatively correlated with political trust, and exposure commercial media was a non-significant factor; (b) correlation was higher for institutional trust than system trust; (c) political values were a significant moderating factor. Implications are discussed.

Keywords: news media effects, political trust, political values, moderating factor, China.

Political trust is a crucial component for democracy (Putnam 1993) as low levels of trust contribute to a political environment in which it is “difficult for leaders to succeed”

(Hetherington 1998, 791). Many political communications scholars have researched the effects that exposure to news media has on an individual’s political trust. (e.g., Warren,

Sulaiman, and Jaafar 2014; Ceron 2015). In previous studies, the relationship between news

1 This is a preprint of an accepted article scheduled to appear in a forthcoming issue of Asian Perspective. It has been copyedited but not paginated. Further edits are possible. Please check back for final article publication details. exposure and political trust has commonly been explained with reference to two opposing media theories: the video malaise (Robinson 1976) and the virtuous circle (Norris 2000) theories. Video malaise claims that negativity, incivility, and lack of substance in the media cause viewers to have declining levels of political trust (Mutz and Reeves 2005). The opposite thesis, the virtuous circle theory, argues that those with higher levels of trust tend to consume more political news, and that such prolonged exposure engenders political trust

(Norris 1999).

In this paper, we make two crucial arguments. First of all, media effects on political trust depends on two concepts, media consumption and media trust, and that measuring media consumption only on political trust is too simplistic. We have to account for how much trust people have in a particular medium. Second, political trust is better investigated by separating its components to system trust and institutional trust, one more stable than the other, and therefore differently affected by media influences. We believe such conceptualization will give us a much fuller picture of the equation of media and political trust.

In addition, few studies have established the functions of political values. Political values can be considered an enduring predisposition in the political belief systems (Goren

2005). They represent and reflect prescriptive beliefs and principles about humanity, society, and public affairs (Rokeach 1973; Feldman 1988). In terms of the role of political values in the relationship between media consumption and political trust, previous studies have focused on the mediating effects of political values, including authoritarian values (Zhang and Dai

2014) and self-expression values (Su and Huang 2015). Ample evidence in political

2 This is a preprint of an accepted article scheduled to appear in a forthcoming issue of Asian Perspective. It has been copyedited but not paginated. Further edits are possible. Please check back for final article publication details. communications effects show that media effects are likely to be conditional rather than universal, dependent not only on media content but also on the orientations of the audiences

(McLeod, Kosicki, and McLeod 2009, 238).

Theoretically, values orientation is a basic personality trait (Bogaert, Boone, and

Declerck 2008) and should be seen as a moderator that affects the relationship between the independent and dependent variables (Baron and Kenny 1986). Therefore, the principal aim of this article is to contribute conceptually and empirically to delineating boundary conditions on the formation of political trust. In order words, we need to understand what kinds of effects happen to what kind of people, rather than treating users homogenously. Only a few studies have been conducted on its moderating role. Meng and Li (2021) developed a moderated mediation model, for example, which found that authoritarian values play a moderating role on hierarchical political trust. However, that study did not consider political values and did not tease out institutional trust and system trust in political trust. This article specifically singles out political values and tested their moderating role on political trust conceptually and empirically so we can delineate boundary conditions on the formation of institutional trust and system trust. We use two waves of large representative survey data from Chinese Internet users to provide reliable and stable results.

This study is organized as follows. First, this article examines the relationship between news media (including official media, commercial media, individual media, and overseas media) and political trust (divided into the subcategories of institutional trust and system trust). Second, we discuss the moderating role of political values in this relationship.

Finally, we outline our analyses, findings, conclusions, and engage in a further discussion

3 This is a preprint of an accepted article scheduled to appear in a forthcoming issue of Asian Perspective. It has been copyedited but not paginated. Further edits are possible. Please check back for final article publication details. based on our results. We find firstly, official media enhance political institutional and system trust, while individual and overseas media undermine political trust. For commercial media, it has a greater positive effect on short-term political trust, like institutional trust but smaller or even insignificant effect on long-term political trust, like system trust despite it is under central government’s control in China. Secondly, media news has greater impacts on institutional trust than system trust, which suggests that political system trust is less likely to be influenced by the media compared with political institution trust. Lastly, media effects on political trust are also conditional and boundary, such effect is mainly reflected in people with low authoritarian values because those with high authoritarian values trust the government by nature.

Literature Review

Explaining Political Trust

Political trust refers to a public mindset that recognizes the legitimacy of a regime (Easton

1965) or a citizen’s confidence in the government or political system (Miller 1974). Research on the origin of political trust involves institutional explanations as well as sociocultural explanations (Mishler and Rose 2001), which are considered mutually complementary (Ma

2007). Institutional explanations indicate that political trust is an endogenous, rational assessment of the performance of government and the credibility of political institutions

(Newton 2001). Low levels of trust in the government undermine the rule of law and perceived governmental legitimacy (Tolbert and Mossberger 2006). The Chinese government,

4 This is a preprint of an accepted article scheduled to appear in a forthcoming issue of Asian Perspective. It has been copyedited but not paginated. Further edits are possible. Please check back for final article publication details. ruling an authoritarian society, is particularly concerned about popular support for the legitimacy of its regime and trust in its politics, especially in a period of rapid transition

(Shen and Guo 2013). On the other hand, the sociocultural explanation holds that political trust is exogenous and rooted both in cultural norms and in the long-range, ingrained pride of a system, which is formed in the socialization process. Previous studies showed that political trust in East Asian countries reflects traditional Confucian values, such as hierarchism (Shin

2013), which is based on paternalistic families (Pye 1992). Ma (2007) studied eight Asian countries and found that authoritarian values are positively correlated with citizens’ levels of political trust. Shi (2014, 7) also affirmed that cultural norms such as authority orientation which “encourages people to be more politically active” are positively correlated with political trust.

In terms of conceptualizing political trust, many scholars measure political trust at the institutional level (Rudolph and Evans 2005; Hooghe, Marien, and Vroome 2012)—including trust in administrative, legal, and societal institutions (Yang and Tang 2010) as well as trust in the national and local governments (Li 2004, 2013, 2016; Wu and Wilkes 2018; Su et al.

2016). However, political trust also denotes trust in a political system (Miller 1974). Hooghe et al. (2012) held the same belief and argued that political trust was based on a perception of the trustworthiness of the political system. In addition, Mutz and Reeves (2005) considered support for a political system to be a strong part of political trust. As can be seen, institutional trust and system trust are two important dimensions in measuring political trust (Norris 1999;

Tang and Huhe 2014). As noted by Easton (1965, 1975), institutional trust (synonymously referred to as political confidence and support) is formed in response to the specific actions

5 This is a preprint of an accepted article scheduled to appear in a forthcoming issue of Asian Perspective. It has been copyedited but not paginated. Further edits are possible. Please check back for final article publication details. and temporal performance of the government or political elite, while political system trust reflects the citizens’ support for or trust in a way of governance which is stable and long-term.

Sources of Political Information on Political Trust

Political communication scholars have presented conflicting evidence about the relationship between sources of news and political trust. All possible viewpoints have been offered: that the correlation is positive (e.g., Norris 2000; Strömbäck, Djerf-Pierre, and Shehata 2016), negative (e.g., Armingeon and Guthmann 2014), and nonexistent (Hetherington 1998).

Obviously, some moderating conditions exist.

A growing body of literature has concluded that confidence in politics varies according to different sources of media (Ceron 2015; Enli and Rosenberg 2018). In Western countries, the notion of video-malaise asserts that typical negative political coverage leads to political cynicism. Robinson (1976) argued that political news on television is among the chief causes of declining political trust. Ceron and Memoli (2016) also found that social media exposure, which is replete with cynicism, was linked with lower trust. Im et al. (2014) also found that time spent on the Internet lowered political trust.

In the Chinese context, there exists a difference between different media sources. In terms of official media sources, there are three major media outlets at the very top, including

Xinhua News Agency, People’s Daily, and CCTV acting as the “mouth-pieces” of the

Communist Party and the central government (Zhang and Boukes 2019). At the provincial

6 This is a preprint of an accepted article scheduled to appear in a forthcoming issue of Asian Perspective. It has been copyedited but not paginated. Further edits are possible. Please check back for final article publication details. and municipal levels, media outlets are also controlled by the governments and usually provide people with political propaganda and/or mobilization information (Zhu, Lu, and Shi

2013). Research has found that consumption of political news in such printed newspapers was positively associated with political trust (e.g., Lu and Duan 2015; Shen and Guo 2013).

To explain this phenomenon, we should consider China’s unique political contexts. The

Chinese Communist Party (CCP) exercises strict control over China’s official media and almost all reports are meticulously filtered and gatekept. Stories presented in the official media are mostly positive, emphasizing prosperity over poverty, health over illness, strength over weakness, and solidarity over separation. When Chinese news consumers place trust in official media, these consumers are contributing to political trust.

Another important segment of Chinese media is commercialized outlets that are neither purely official propaganda nor consumer-oriented. In the last thirty years, many such commercial media outlets came into existence. Jiang (2010) called them

“government-regulated commercial spaces,” and these websites and their digital platforms are operated by private companies but subject to government regulation. They are commercial entities but exist as a vehicle to disseminate party line and party policy (Pan 2000) as a compromise and they exercise self-censorship (Jiang 2010; Huang 2016). Thus, we speculate that news consumption from these commercial media outlets is also correlated to levels of political trust.

It is also interesting that, in the Chinese case, people’s confidence in their government may be based on indirect information from various sources, not only formal channels such as official media and commercial media but also informal ones such as grapevine news. When

7 This is a preprint of an accepted article scheduled to appear in a forthcoming issue of Asian Perspective. It has been copyedited but not paginated. Further edits are possible. Please check back for final article publication details. people live in societies without a guaranteed free flow of information, they search for information from unofficial channels (Zhu, Lu, and Shi 2013). This type of grapevine news tends to provide people with mostly negative political information such as news about government corruption, which may lead to lower political trust (Anderson and Tverdova

2003).

Another kind of media outlet for individuals in China is overseas media. Although the

Chinese government controls access to political information, the government can in effect only filter some “harmful” foreign web content through the Great Firewall (Qiu 2000).

People can still obtain political information from foreign websites by “jumping over the wall” to access platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, where information about

Chinese politics is likely to be at odds with the Chinese official lines. Previous studies have indicated that the image of China portrayed in Western media reports is generally not friendly enough, difficult to cooperate with, and threatening to other countries (Zheng and Li 2012); strong negative emotions are implicit if not always explicit in the depiction (Tian, Yang, and

Lang 2013). The prevalent attitude toward China in Western media reports involving China is mainly negative (Hu 2016). There are also some historical studies that focus on the process of change in overseas media coverage of China. An international study on public opinion related to China using Redditt data between 2007 and 2015 shows that negative posts about China outnumbered positive posts, and the tendency of negative-led sentiment is higher than positive sentiment (Gong, Zhang, and Cai 2017). Although Western media gradually began to recognize China’s economic achievements, and the perspective of reporting changed from looking down and belittling to looking up and understanding, Western media, based on their

8 This is a preprint of an accepted article scheduled to appear in a forthcoming issue of Asian Perspective. It has been copyedited but not paginated. Further edits are possible. Please check back for final article publication details. own interests and demands, still reflects dominant Western values in their reports (Xu and

Wang 2018). Zhou, Deng, and Wu (2020) argues that foreign websites are rich in information about Western democracy, better public services, more transparent governance, more freedom of speech, and so on. Such information may increase the public’s quest for democracy and raise expectations of government performance, and political trust decreases when they feel that the government, in turn, is not meeting this requirement.

Obviously, different political news sources frame political information differently, which in turn affects people’s perception of politics. Therefore, we propose the following hypotheses:

Hypothesis 1A (H1a): Exposure to official media is positively correlated with political trust (including institutional trust and system trust).

Hypothesis 1B (H1b): Exposure to commercial media is positively correlated with political trust (including institutional trust and system trust).

Hypothesis 1C (H1c): Exposure to individual media is negatively correlated with political trust (including institutional trust and system trust).

Hypothesis 1D (H1d): Exposure to overseas media is negatively correlated with political trust (including institutional trust and system trust).

Political Values in China

Political values are normative principles and beliefs about the government, citizenship, and society (McCann 1997) and reflect fundamental personal values in politics (Schwartz,

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Caprara, and Vecchione 2010). Scholars have identified a variety of political values from many perspectives, including equality of opportunity (Feldman 1988), egalitarianism

(McCann 1997), libertarianism, authoritarianism, socialist/laissez-faire (Heath, Jowell, and

Curtice 1985), and limited government (Goren 2005). Authoritarianism as a political value has been investigated in previous studies (e.g., Altemeyer 1988; Hetherington and Weiler

2009; Meng and Li 2021). Authoritarian orientation is deeply rooted in Asian societies where

Confucianism is practiced (Lin 1938; Ma and Yang 2014). In Confucian cultures, people obey traditional values, including filial piety to their parents and loyalty to their country (Lin 1938), affording both the father and the government power to rule their family and their people, respectively (Ma and Yang 2014). Authoritarian values are important in people’s daily lives, especially in a country like China. Many scholars have examined the impact of authoritarian values on the evaluation of governmental behaviors and political trust (Citrin 1974; Ma 2007;

Shi 2014; Shin 2013; Yang and Tang 2010). For example, Ma and Yang (2014) found authoritarian orientation was positively correlated with political trust. The explanation was that people regard government and their political leaders as authoritarian symbols. Thus, they trust their government and system without much question due to deference to authorities and dependence on them (Ma and Yang 2014). Therefore, in this paper, we measure authoritarian orientation as a key component of political value.

The Moderating Role of Political Values

Previous studies have examined variables moderating news media’s influence on political

10 This is a preprint of an accepted article scheduled to appear in a forthcoming issue of Asian Perspective. It has been copyedited but not paginated. Further edits are possible. Please check back for final article publication details. trust. For example, Valentino, Beckmann, and Buhr (2001, 355) suggested that framing had differing effects on political trust depending on partisanship. The researchers designed “two versions of the same story, one with strategic attributions and the other with issue-based attributions for a candidate’s behavior, provide the basic manipulation for this design.” And the results found that those who did not identify with either the Democratic or Republican parties had less confidence in the government when exposed to strategic frames than their counterparts who were exposed to issue frames. Likewise, Mutz and Reeves (2005) showed that individuals’ propensities for conflict avoidance were a moderator in the impact of uncivil discourse on political trust. Norris (2000) found that prior political trust and political engagement moderated media effects on political trust, confirming the virtuous circle. People with higher political trust and engagement initially consumed more media, which in turn reinforced their political trust.

However, little research attention has been devoted to examining whether political values act as moderators between news exposure on political trust. We seek to ﬁll this gap.

Theoretically, value orientation can be considered as a basic personality trait (Bogaert, Boone, and Declerck 2008) and a moderator variable in this equation (Farh, Earley, and Lin 1997).

The phenomenon that consumers tend to see and hear information that is favorable or consistent with their interests and predispositions is referred to as “selective exposure”

(Bryant and Zillmann 1984). Different people with different political values likely tend to consume different news media. Under selective exposure, people with fewer strongly held political values may consume less news or favor information from nontraditional and nonofficial sources, whereas those with more strongly held political values may consume

11 This is a preprint of an accepted article scheduled to appear in a forthcoming issue of Asian Perspective. It has been copyedited but not paginated. Further edits are possible. Please check back for final article publication details. more news or favor information from official sources. In the process of selective exposure, existing predispositions, such as political trust, are reinforced. Thus, it is reasonable to expect that political values moderate the relationship between media exposure and political trust.

Based on the literature reviewed above, we propose the following hypothesis:

Hypothesis 2A (H2a): Authoritarian values moderate the relationship between official media and political trust (including institutional trust and system trust).

Hypothesis 2B (H2b): Authoritarian values moderate the relationship between commercial media and political trust (including institutional trust and system trust).

Hypothesis 2C (H2c): Authoritarian values moderate the relationship between individual media and political trust (including institutional trust and system trust).

Hypothesis 2D (H2d): Authoritarian values moderate the relationship between overseas media and political trust (including institutional trust and system trust).

Methods

Sample and Data Collection

This paper relied on two waves of national survey data collected in China in 2014 and in

2017. As such, both were secondary data, and the one completed in 2017 was the latest. The two surveys were designed and implemented by the Department of Political Science at the

Renmin University of China. These two datasets were accessible to academic researchers after their respective short-term embargo.

The team used an online survey via a survey website, Wenjuan.com, with participants

12 This is a preprint of an accepted article scheduled to appear in a forthcoming issue of Asian Perspective. It has been copyedited but not paginated. Further edits are possible. Please check back for final article publication details. recruited through a social media platform, Sina Weibo, and the most popular social media app

WeChat. Wenjuan (translated as questionnaire) is a company that specializes in online surveys, sharing links to registered members to answer questionnaires and to receive nominal monetary rewards. Users can answer questionnaires voluntarily. Each individual was only allowed to answer the questionnaire once to avoid repeated answers and to ensure the data integrity by limiting IP addresses. Only respondents who spent more than 10 minutes answering about 40 questions were entered into the databases for further screening. The two surveys had 4,129 (2014) and 2,379 (2017) valid responses, respectively.

Measures

News Media Influence

This study is mainly concerned with the reception of different news media and their potential influences. Zaller (1992) raised such a view in his book The Nature and Origins of Mass

Opinion—that it is the media information that an individual has accepted that matters, rather than the media information that an individual is exposed to. However, it is difficult to know how much of the information an individual has accepted as valid. In this study, we conceptualize news media influence using the product of the degree of media receptivity and the degree of media trust (see Equation 1, Ma and Wang 2015). The higher the degree of one’s media reception and media trust is, the more likely one will accept information as valid.

Based on such considerations, we therefore took news media reception and media trust to measure news media influence here (Ma and Wang 2015).

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[Equation1] news media influence (M)= news media reception (R) * media trust (T)

The variable news media reception is an indicator of the amount of information exposure, and it was measured based on answers to the following question: “How often do you read political news or current affairs commentary on the following media channels?”

These channels were divided into four kinds in accordance with the Chinese context: official media (consumption of political news from CCTV, Xinhua News Agency, People’s Daily); commercial media (Sina.com, Ifeng.com, Tencent; Toutiao.com, Yidianzixun.com, and other news aggregation clients); individual media (political insider, social media apps such as

Wechat); and overseas media (information sources from outside of China). The responses were measured using a four-point Likert-type scale with the following items: “hardly ever”

(1), “occasionally” (2), “often” (3), and “almost every day” (4).

For the measurement of media trust, the original question was: “If there is an emergency or crisis, to what extent do you trust the information published by these information channels?” The responses were measured using a five-point Likert-type scale with the following items: “completely untrustworthy” (1), “a little trustworthy” (2), “neutral”

(3), “very trustworthy” (4), and “completely trustworthy” (5).

News media influence is best represented as a ratio value between 0 to 1 to be intuitive. To make that possible, the values of media news reception and media trust should also range from 0 to 1. Some data conversion was needed for these secondary analyses, because the original values of news reception ranged from 1 to 4 while those of media trust from 1 to 5. If taking an averaging method, these assigned values should be “0” “0.33” “0.66” and “1”. But considering the fact that the gap between “occasionally” and “often” is supposed

14 This is a preprint of an accepted article scheduled to appear in a forthcoming issue of Asian Perspective. It has been copyedited but not paginated. Further edits are possible. Please check back for final article publication details. to be a bit larger than the one between “hardly ever” and “occasionally,” as well as the one between “often” and “almost every day,” we adjust these assigned values to “0” “0.3” “0.7” and “1” using the averaging method. Similarly, the values of media trust are adjusted to “0”

“0.3” “0.5” “0.7” and “1” (Ma and Wang 2015). The political influence index of the six types of information channels is thus obtained.

Political Trust

This study focuses on two dimensions of political trust: institutional trust refers to popular trust in public institutions, while system trust refers to trust in a regime and in the state system.

Five separate measurements were used concerning institutional trust (2014:

Alpha=0.84; 2017: Alpha =0.83), namely trust in the justice system, the police, the Party

Central Committee and the Central Government, and provincial governments. These items were measured using a four-point Likert-type scale anchored at “not at all” (1), “not very much” (2), “quite a lot” (3), and “a great deal” (4). The average of the five items formed a measure of institution trust. Three items were used to measure system trust (2014: Alpha

=0.71; 2017: Alpha =0.75): “China must adhere to the principles of Marxism and Maoism and must follow the socialist approach,” “The separation of powers is not suitable for China’s national context and China should not copy the political system of Western countries,” and

“There are arguments in democracies every day. Thus they lose many opportunities of development and are not as efficient as our country which has long been ruled by a single

15 This is a preprint of an accepted article scheduled to appear in a forthcoming issue of Asian Perspective. It has been copyedited but not paginated. Further edits are possible. Please check back for final article publication details. party.” The level of agreement was measured using a five-point Likert-type scale anchored at

“strongly disagree” (1), “disagree” (2), “neutral” (3), “agree” (4), and “strongly agree” (5).

The average of the three items formed a measure of system trust.

Authoritarian Values

Altemeyer (2006) measured authoritarianism mainly from three perspectives: authoritarian submission, conventionalism, and authoritarian aggression. Based on this, the following nine questions were used to measure authoritarian values (2014: Alpha =0.889; 2017: Alpha

=0.77): “Government leaders are patriarchs, and everyone should obey them”; “Even if the parents’ demands are not reasonable, the children should follow them”; “Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues that children should learn”; “It is right to obey your own boss or someone who is higher than you”; “A minority should not criticize or oppose the opinions of the majority”; “It is never wrong to obey the government”; “The people who challenge the authority of the government and the existing social order must be severely punished”; “It is important to respect our traditional Confucian culture and customs”;

“As long as the leader’s character is noble, then anything can be handed over to them.” The level of agreement was measured using a five-point Likert-type scale anchored at “strongly disagree” (1), “disagree” (2), “neutral” (3), “agree” (4), and “strongly agree” (5). The average of the nine items formed a measure of system trust.

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Results

STATA 14.0 was used for all analyses in this study. The survey participants’ demographic information is displayed in Table 1.

Descriptive Statistics

Table 1. Descriptive Statistics of Variables

Year=2014; N=2970 Year=2017; N=2379

Frequency (Percentage) Frequency (Percentage) female 1,086 (36.57) 1,162 (48.84) Gender male 1,883 (63.4) 1,217 (51.16) missing 1 (0.03) / 18-24 698 (23.5) 576 (24.21) 25-34 1,247 (41.99) 819 (34.43) Age 35-44 617 (20.78) 620 (26.06) >=45 408 (13.74) 364 (15.3) under middle school 64 (2.16) 38(1.6) high school 224 (7.54) 178 (7.48) Education Level college 2,113 (71.15) 1,678 (70.53) graduate 568 (19.12) 485 (20.39) missing 1 (0.03) / <=20k 264 (8.89) 207 (8.7) 21-39k 265 (8.92) 124 (5.21) 40-59k 387 (13.03) 333 (14) Family Income 60-99k 692 (23.3) 401 (16.86) 100-199k 834 (28.08) 834 (35.06) >=200k 519 (17.47) 470 (19.76) missing 9 (0.3) 10 (0.42) non-party 2,112 (71.11) 1,659 (69.74) Politics Status communist party 857 (28.86) 720 (30.26) missing 1 (0.03) /

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As shown in Table 1, the majority of the respondents are younger than 35 years old,

well-educated, and financially stable.

Regression Analyses

The first research question asked if sources of political information influenced people’s

political trust as measured in institutional trust and system trust. Regression analyses results

are shown in Table 2 as follows:

Table 2. News Media Effects on Political Trust Institutional trust System trust

2014 2017 2014 2017 Male 0.207*** 0.067** 0.163*** -0.006 (0.025) (0.025) (0.042) (0.021) Age 25-34 -0.024 -0.003 0.070** 0.066* (0.031) (0.034) (0.053) (0.028) 35-44 -0.149*** -0.084** -0.065** 0.070* (0.037) (0.037) (0.062) (0.031) >=45 -0.230*** -0.110*** -0.183*** 0.001 (0.041) (0.043) (0.070) (0.035) Education High school 0.018 -0.059 0.058 0.053 (0.089) (0.118) (0.150) (0.094) College 0.089 -0.105 0.041 0.065 (0.080) (0.110) (0.136) (0.087) Graduate 0.006 -0.232** -0.084 -0.088 (0.084) (0.114) (0.142) (0.090) Family income 21-39k -0.025 0.032 -0.035 -0.039 (0.055) (0.067) (0.093) (0.056) 40-59k -0.003 0.03 -0.053* 0.012 (0.051) (0.054) (0.086) (0.044) 60-99k 0.029 0.041 -0.001 -0.037

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(0.047) (0.052) (0.079) (0.043) 100-199k -0.006 0.047 -0.013 -0.028 (0.046) (0.048) (0.078) (0.039) >=200k -0.012 0.047 -0.041 -0.045 (0.049) (0.052) (0.083) (0.043)

Communist party 0.144*** 0.101*** 0.140*** 0.080*** (0.026) (0.029) (0.045) (0.023) Demographics R2 (%) 14.8 3.8 11.7 2.9 Male 0.073*** 0.041* 0.002 0.012 (0.020) (0.022) (0.031) (0.019) Age 25-34 -0.086*** -0.051* -0.009 0.017 (0.024) (0.031) (0.037) (0.026) 35-44 -0.170*** -0.127*** -0.093*** 0.023 (0.029) (0.034) (0.044) (0.029) >=45 -0.198*** -0.135*** -0.150*** -0.016 (0.032) (0.038) (0.049) (0.032) Education High school -0.024 -0.068 0.02 0.045 (0.069) (0.105) (0.106) (0.088) College 0.05 -0.108 0.021 0.075 (0.062) (0.097) (0.095) (0.082) Graduate 0.054 -0.127 -0.004 0.012 (0.065) (0.101) (0.100) (0.085) Family income 21-39k -0.02 0.034 -0.023 -0.033 (0.043) (0.060) (0.066) (0.051) 40-59k 0.002 0.033 -0.039* 0.018 (0.039) (0.047) (0.061) (0.040) 60-99k 0.015 0.015 -0.007 -0.044 (0.036) (0.046) (0.055) (0.039) 100-199k -0.011 0.007 -0.003 -0.044 (0.036) (0.042) (0.055) (0.036) >=200k 0.007 0.029 -0.01 -0.049 (0.038) (0.046) (0.059) (0.039) Communist party 0.045** 0.026 0.031* 0.022 (0.021) (0.026) (0.032) (0.022) Official media influence 0.281*** 0.262*** 0.273*** 0.149*** (0.047) (0.055) (0.073) (0.046) Commercial media 0.029 0.083*** 0.024 0.039

19 This is a preprint of an accepted article scheduled to appear in a forthcoming issue of Asian Perspective. It has been copyedited but not paginated. Further edits are possible. Please check back for final article publication details. influence (0.044) (0.062) (0.068) (0.052) Individual media -0.067*** -0.059** -0.040** -0.039 influence (0.060) (0.066) (0.093) (0.056) Overseas media -0.158*** -0.116*** -0.173*** -0.083*** influence (0.047) (0.06) (0.072) (0.051) Authoritarian values 0.349*** 0.353*** 0.477*** 0.366*** (0.016) (0.017) (0.025) (0.014) N 2915 2097 2916 2167 R2 (%) 49.5 28.1 56.7 20.4 Adjusted R2 (%) 49.1 27.5 56.5 19.7 Notes: Regression coefﬁcients are standardized, and standard errors in parentheses. The tick symbol represents significance. *p <.05, **p <.01, ***p <.001

As shown in Table 2, official media, individual media, and overseas media had

significant, blanket influence on institutional trust and system trust, though the last two were

in the reverse direction. Official media was positively correlated with institutional trust and

system trust; individual media and overseas media influence were negatively correlated. In

general, a larger amount of variances were explained for institutional trust than system trust.

Moderating Analyses of Authoritarian Values

The second research question asked if authoritarian values moderated the relationship

between sources of political information and political trust. Moderation analyses results are

shown in Table 3 as follows:

Table 3. Moderating Analyses of Authoritarian Values on News Media Influence on Political Trust

Institutional trust System trust

2014 2017 2014 2017

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Male 0.071*** -0.036 -0.003 0.015 (0.020) (0.022) (0.030) (0.019) Age 25-34 -0.082*** -0.051* -0.005 0.016 (0.024) (0.031) (0.037) (0.026) 35-44 -0.160*** -0.126*** -0.081*** 0.023 (0.028) (0.034) (0.043) (0.029) >=45 -0.185*** -0.126*** -0.139*** -0.012 (0.032) (0.039) (0.049) (0.033) Education High school -0.022 -0.058 0.024 0.047 (0.068) (0.104) (0.104) (0.088) College 0.056 -0.091 0.026 0.079 (0.061) (0.097) (0.094) (0.082) Graduate 0.055 -0.114 -0.003 0.015 (0.064) (0.100) (0.099) (0.085) Family income 21-39k -0.019 0.036 -0.02 -0.032 (0.042) (0.059) (0.065) (0.051) 40-59k 0.003 0.037 -0.040* 0.019 (0.039) (0.047) (0.060) (0.040) 60-99k 0.013 0.018 -0.009 -0.043 (0.036) (0.046) (0.055) (0.039) 100-199k -0.008 0.008 -0.001 -0.045 (0.035) (0.042) (0.054) (0.036) >=200k 0.006 0.033 -0.008 -0.048 (0.038) (0.046) (0.058) (0.039) Communist party 0.040** 0.025 0.029* 0.022 (0.021) (0.026) (0.031) (0.022) Official media influence 0.463*** 0.483*** 0.689*** 0.244* (0.153) (0.228) (0.235) (0.196) Commercial media influence 0.181*** 0.337*** -0.071 0.135 (0.136) (0.254) (0.209) (0.219) Individual media influence -0.174*** -0.272** -0.101** -0.194* (0.158) (0.27) (0.242) (0.231) Overseas media influence -0.268*** -0.222** -0.202*** -0.174* (0.128) (0.225) (0.197) (0.189) Authoritarian values 0.394** 0.440*** 0.540*** 0.373***

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(0.026) (0.032) (0.04) (0.028) Official media influence -0.214*** -0.266* -0.505*** -0.116 * Authoritarian values (0.07) (0.075) (0.107) (0.065) Commercial media influence -0.194*** -0.304** 0.063 -0.116 * Authoritarian values (0.067) (0.081) (0.103) (0.070) Individual media influence 0.121** 0.248* 0.083* 0.176 *Authoritarian values (0.081) (0.084) (0.125) (0.072) Overseas media influence 0.134** 0.134 0.053 0.106 *Authoritarian values (0.072) (0.073) (0.11) (0.062) N 2915 2097 2916 2167 R2 (%) 50.9 29.1 58.2 20.7 Adjusted R2 (%) 50.5 28.3 57.9 19.9 Notes: Regression coefﬁcients are standardized, and standard errors in parentheses. The tick symbol represents significance. *p <.05, **p <.01, ***p <.001

Results in Table 3 provided evidence for the moderating effects of authoritarian values

in the relationship between media news influence on political trust. Specifically, on the level

of institutional trust, authoritarian values negatively moderated the relationship between

official media influence and institutional trust (2014: β= -0.214, p<0.001; 2017: β= -0.266,

p<0.05) and also negatively moderated the relationship between commercial media influence

and institutional trust (2014: β= -0.194, p<0.001; 2017: β= -0.304, p<0.05). While it

positively moderated the relationship between individual media influence and institutional

trust (2014: β= 0.121, p<0.01; 2017: β= 0.248, p<0.05), and positively moderated the

relationship between overseas media influence and institutional trust in 2014 (β= 0.134,

p<0.01) such effects disappeared in 2017. Interestingly, on system trust, there were no

moderating effects on the relationship between commercial media influence, overseas media

influence, and system trust. However, authoritarian values moderated the relationship

between official media, individual media, and system trust only in 2014, albeit inconsistently

22 This is a preprint of an accepted article scheduled to appear in a forthcoming issue of Asian Perspective. It has been copyedited but not paginated. Further edits are possible. Please check back for final article publication details. in direction. For hypothesis 2, it seemed that the increase of authoritarian values weakened the effects of official media and commercial media on political trust, such that for those people with the highest authoritarian values, political trust was also high and stable, such that media had no influence at all. In other words, the positive correlation between these two types of media on political trust was mainly existent among people with lower authoritative values.

Discussion

In all, our data indicate the inference that specific types of media play a different role in political trust and they also set some boundary conditions in such a relationship. First, official media has positive effects on political trust, including institutional trust and system trust, which is consistent with previous studies (Marcinkowski and Starke 2018; Hong and Zhang

2020). In the Chinese media context, official media represent the voice of the party and the central government, and they always try to disseminate positive messages and government policies to maintain a sense of “harmony” (Shen and Guo 2013). In other words, they serve to build a higher level of political trust (Ceron 2015). However, individual media and overseas media appear to undermine trust in political institutions and the political system. Studies showed that political information in these types of media are more negative (Zhu, Lu, and Shi

2013), which might contribute to lower institutional trust and system trust. Also, the results show that overseas media has a solid and robust negative impact on political trust.

Interestingly, we find that commercial media almost is ineffective on system trust; however, it

23 This is a preprint of an accepted article scheduled to appear in a forthcoming issue of Asian Perspective. It has been copyedited but not paginated. Further edits are possible. Please check back for final article publication details. has positive effects on institutional trust which is consistent with Ceron’s findings in 2015.

This conclusion needs to be seen in the Chinese context, where, despite the central government’s control of commercial media, the media’s influence on politics is more on short-term political evaluations, like institutional trust, instead of a long-term political evaluation, like system trust. Unlike official media, which has a positive impact on both institutional trust and system trust, the commercial media are less likely to have a positive impact on system trust, as commercial media are less subject to top-down control and are naturally less susceptible to central management than traditional media (Tang and Huhe

2014).

Second, overall, media news influence has greater impacts on enhancing institutional trust than system trust, especially in 2017. Consistent with our research findings, Tang and

Huhe (2014) also finds that online framing is negatively related to policy support and government performance evaluation; however, it is ineffective in diffuse support. This can be explained by Easton’s (1965) statement that “support for a regime is stable and long-term commitments,” thus we can conclude that political system is interpreted as measuring legitimacy. In contrast, political institution is closely related to the actions and performance of the government or political elites. In this way, compared with institutional trust, the influence of news media on institutional trust is more obvious and powerful.

From the results of the moderating effects, we can conclude that the effects of media effects on political trust is conditional and boundary. For those who have a higher sense of authoritarian values, the influence of official media and commercial media on political trust is small or even not significant. In other words, this influence is more pronounced in people

24 This is a preprint of an accepted article scheduled to appear in a forthcoming issue of Asian Perspective. It has been copyedited but not paginated. Further edits are possible. Please check back for final article publication details. with low authoritarian values. People with high authoritarian values trust the government by nature, thus the media effect is weakened. For those who have lower authoritarian values, the influence of commercial media and its potential destructive power on political trust is greater and more significant.

Culture theory insists political trust is rooted in the cultural norms and formed in the socialization process (Mishler and Rose 2001). China is a Confucian society where people grow up in a strong authoritarian culture and are usually taught to respect authority. Thus, the effects of authoritarian values on institutional and system trust are quite strong and stable. In comparison, the effects of official, commercial, overseas, and individual media influence on institutional and system trust are smaller, as shown by the standardized coefficients (see Table

2). This may indicate cultural values have greater effects on political trust than media.

Furthermore, this study finds that media effects theory on political trust has its own conditional boundary. Media effects are more effective for people who are less motivated by cultural values and have little impact on people whose cultural values are already deeply rooted.

Contributions

The contributions of this study are threefold: First, this paper investigated the influence of news media rather than the general consumption of news media, especially different types of media, which enriches the measurements of news media effects. Many past studies focused on the relationship between general media usage and political trust (e.g., Shen and Guo 2013;

25 This is a preprint of an accepted article scheduled to appear in a forthcoming issue of Asian Perspective. It has been copyedited but not paginated. Further edits are possible. Please check back for final article publication details.

Ceron 2015) while neglecting the role of media trust. We believe that media trust rests first of all on how much an individual believes in the media, media use then exerts its influence on this basis to form media trust. In other words, only when an individual trusts a medium, consumption of its content may have an impact on the individual. It is therefore superfluous to measure general media use and its relationship with political trust. We believe our media influence measure in this study is a step forward as it synthesizes the two concepts of media use and media trust.

Second, this study examines the two dimensions of political trust, which is contributing to a more in-depth understanding of the concept of political trust. Political trust is a complex and difficult concept to measure. In previous studies, scholars are generally concerned about institutional trust (Ceron 2015) and hierarchical trust (Su et al. 2016; Meng and Li 2021). The former is conducive to grasping political trust from a macro perspective, and the latter is a response to the view that there might be levels of trust accordingly to levels of governments. However, such measures ignore the differences between trust in political institutions and trust in the political system. Trust in political institutions is mainly based on the performance legitimacy of a government. However, Chinese people’s knowledge of performance legitimacy comes mainly from media coverage in addition to their own life experience and practice. Therefore, people’s trust in that regard is more likely to be influenced by news media. Political system issues, on the other hand, are more stable as most

Chinese are not exposed to other alternatives than socialism and are less likely to be influenced by the media to a large extent. We believe that the media still has an influence on the trust of the political system, but our research has found that the media has a greater

26 This is a preprint of an accepted article scheduled to appear in a forthcoming issue of Asian Perspective. It has been copyedited but not paginated. Further edits are possible. Please check back for final article publication details. influence on the trust of political institutions than the trust in the political system. Therefore, future research should continue to distinguish types of political trust.

Last but not least, this study examines the moderating role of political values, specifying the conditions for news media effects on political trust. In other words, Chinese cultural values are an important and stable variable when discussing the influence of media effects. However, this adjustment effect mainly affects institutional trust rather than system trust. This once again shows that we must consider the differences in institutions and systems when studying political trust in China. As such, we understand more about why these effects occur at all and why they are potent when they do occur.

Limitations and Future Research

There are still several limitations in this study. First, political values may have other dimensions on top of what we measure. The variables examined in this model are not comprehensive. Second, in our sample, the majority of the respondents had earned undergraduate and graduate degrees. As a result, the current study cannot explain the relationship among less educated users. Third, in terms of generalizability, given that the data was limited to a single country, there is a lack of comparability in the results. A greater degree of validity could be achieved by replicating this study in other countries and contexts in future research. Fourth, the analysis is based on survey data so it is hard to assess causal mechanisms. Future studies could use experiments to gauge the effect of news media effects consumption on political trust.

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Notes

Xiaoxiao Meng is a PhD candidate in the School of Media & Communication at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Her research interests include political communication, platform privacy and quantitative research methods. She can be reached at [email protected].

Dr. Shuhua Zhou is Professor and Leonard H. Goldenson Endowed Chair in Radio and Television of School of Journalism at University of Missouri. He studies how people learn from news, focusing on the basic processes of news cognition, including perception, attention and memory as well as individual and situational differences in cognition. He can be reached at [email protected].

We are very grateful to Professor Deyong Ma at Renmin University of China for his approval of using the dataset Chinese “Netizens Social Consciousness Survey (2014, 2017)” in this study. This work was supported by China Scholarship Council [Grant 202006230194].

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