How to improve people’s trust in government has become one of the core issues among the world since 1960s. Although discussions about this issue last a long time, academia so far haven’t draw a conclusion [1]. There are two reasons as below. First, trust is a psychology perception, which seems difficult to be measured accurately. Second, there are some essential arguments, such as, whether people’s trust in government has declined in past decades among academia. This circumstance is not good for drawing conclusions. But what we have to acknowledge is that discussing the topic of people’s trust in government is still important.

With the development of ICTs, many governments started to build digital governments and developed E-governance, such as USA, UK. Some scholars, who are the technical optimism, hold the view that government can improve working efficiency and ameliorate people’s attitude towards government through the latest technology. For instance, Tolbert and Mossberger [2] think that E-governance can improve people’s trust in governments by two approaches: One is socalled the entrepreneurial approach, which means that governments could fulfill citizens’ needs, such as handling some businesses, searching for materials and portfolios, through internet. This can be seen as the practice of the core requests and value of New Public Management. Comparing to traditional ways, using governments’ websites or other ICTs approaches to handle things is more convenient and effective. What’s more, with the process of building a open government¹, people can get more data and materials from official. And governments also become more transparent. Another one is so-called the participatory approach, which means citizens can take part in public discussions, passing own opinion, and voting, by some online tools. This approach could not only improve people’s trust in governments, but promote the development of democracy. As a result, this approach also be called E-democracy or E-participation [3].

In past decades, Chinese government also tried to improve working efficiency and people’s trust in government, which was playing one of the most important role in country’s modernization process. Chinese economy and society have gained a significantly development, since 1978 when the policy of Reform and Open became the one of the most important country’s strategies. However, some problems, such as corruption, seriously affected government’s working efficient and people’s trust in government. In order to solve these problems, Chinese government formulated plan about administration reform. For instance, the prime minister Li Keqiang proposed building a transparent, responding, and credible government. Thanks for the development of ICTs, Chinese government have many tools to send services and open data though Internet. In spite of conventional online tools, Chinese government also use some latest technology, such as social media, to develop E-governance [4].

In past few years, we focued on the issue of how to use ICTs to build a transparent and credible government. It seems that most of us accept such view that E-governance would significantly affect people’s trust in governments. But some surveys showed the different consequences. Thus, this study is trying to answer the question that whether E-governance has a direct impact on the level of people’s trust in the Chinese government. There are some specific questions: (1) Whether the effect exists in realist? (2) What’s approach (the entrepreneurial approach or the participatory approach) of E-governance can affect people’s trust in Chinese governance? (3) How can Chinese government respond to the result?

What is trust

Answering the question of what is trust is quite difficult. Thomas thought that the more calculating profits means the less trust. In other words, in his view, trust is not something about calculating, but something about emotion and sense. In field of politics, trust is including the trust about government, the trust about government officers, regime and so on.

People’s trust in governments is the legitimacy of governments [5,6]. In A system analysis of political life, Eason thought people’s trust in governments can be divided to two types. The one is ‘general supports’, which means citizens are satisfied with the whole of regimes and governments. Another is ‘specific supports’, which means people possibly support or nonsupport government’s behaviors. The decisive factor lies in the processes and outcomes of public policies. If the processes are transparent and scientific, and outcomes can benefit a lot, citizens will feel satisfied and trust in government. When the opposite happens, people’ trust in government will be affected [6]. If we study other types of trust, the concept seems various.

Because of the various concepts, it’s very difficult to operate this core element. In past decades, different scholars and constitutions had taken different method to operate the concept of trust².

The reason of trust fall and how to solve it

Comparing to past, people’s trust in governments has declined, which is accepted by most of government officers and scholars. In why people don’t trust in governments, Nye thought the four main elements that contribute to trust fall as below. (1) Efficiency: people don’t trust governments as before, because of the low governments’ working efficiency. (2) Slow economic growth: many evidences show that there are a strong positive correlation between economic growth and the level of people’s trust in governments. (3) Politics: some politics factors, such as level of democracy, transparent, credible, will deeply affect people’s attitude towards governments. (4) Society and Culture: one of the most important elements that affect people’s trust in governments is social capital, which proposed by Putnam.

Some scholars thought there are three ways to improve people’s trust in governments. First, characteristic-based trust: through the same characters of personalities, such as family background, religion and faith, to strength the level of trust. Second, process-based: through repeated exchange, the level of trust can be improved. For instance, if governments can organize some formal or informal forums with citizens or interest groups regularly, the phenomenon of trust falling will be changed [3]. Third, institutional-based: through formal institution, such as laws, governments’ rules, organization principles, the trust fall will be reversed.

E-governance improves people’s trust in governments

At the beginning of E-governance studies, many of scholars focused on the open data and online services. With the development of E-governance studies, some scholars started to pay attention to civil participation and E-democracy [7-10]. Min-Hsiu proposed that E-governance can be divided to two aspects, that is, E-government and E-democracy. E-government concludes infrastructure, service delivery, and public discussions. E-democracy concludes service delivery, public discussion, and decision-making. Sakowicz [11] thought that E-governance is concluded by four aspects, which are E-service, E-management, E-business, and E-democracy. In spite of differences, all of scholar agree to that E-governance is concluding efficient online service and more democratic governments.

Tolbert et al. [2] held the view that could improve people’s trust in governments through two approaches. First, entrepreneurial approach, Governments could use various ICTs technologies to provide information, data, materials, and online service to everyone. The high quality data and online service will not only benefit citizens a lot, but improve people’s trust in governments [12]. Tong-yi et al. [3] divided entrepreneurial approach into two aspects. The one is ‘open data’, which means governments build and open data base through internet. The other is ‘online service’, such as online office. Second, participatory approach, this approach also be called ‘online democracy’, E-participation, or E-democracy, which means citizens can use social media and other ICTs tools, built by governments, to take part in online discussion, and even online voting. Some scholars thought that this approach has more deeper impact on people’s trust in government than entrepreneurial approach, because citizens can participated in public agendas discussion and provide their own opinion to governments more freely and forwardly. Some technical optimists have said that E-governance is big revolution among democracy regimes. Welch said that “… In the process of governments applied ICTs, if official institutions could follow such principles, such as fairness, transparency, interaction, people’s trust in institutions will be improved significantly…”

However, these scholars introduced above hadn’t give enough positive evidences to prove their framework. There are also little works that used positive methodology to measure and test whether E-governance will improve people’s trust in the government. This question is quite important in Chinese realistic context (governments credibility have been affected significantly by serious corruption and comparatively slow economic growth). Overall, this article tries to use survey data to test the framework, which is proposed by Tolbert et al. [2] and enriched by other scholars, and answer whether E-governance will improve people’s trust in the Chinese government.

Framework and hypothesis

This article apply quantitative method, and use questionnaire survey to collect research data. And the framework of this research is according to Tolbert and Mossberger’ study. Thus, the dependent variable is E-governance, which can be divided to two aspects, including entrepreneurial approach and participatory approach. And entrepreneurial approach is including ‘open data’ and ‘online service’. The dependent variable is people’s trust in government. With this framework, the article proposes its hypotheses as below (Figure 1):

Figure 1: Framework and hypothesis of this article.

(1) H1: These people who are more satisfied ‘open data’ will show more trust in the Chinese government.

(2) H2: These people who are more satisfied with ‘online service’ will show more trust in the Chinese government.

(3) H3: These people who more satisfied with taking part in ‘online discussion’ will show more trust in Chinese the government.

Questionnaire survey and Sampling

Because of the limit of time and resources, this article can not sampling among the country. This research takes Shanghai as study object and questionnaire in Shanghai city. The reason why choose Shanghai city to collect research data is in view of the level of economic development and the popularity of Internet. Comparing to other areas of China, Shanghai has a higher degree of economic development, modernization, and popularity of Internet. Thus, Shanghai is a typical case.

Specifically, the questionnaire survey was though ‘www.sojump. com’, a Chinese online survey website. Taking Shanghai citizens as a object group, using the method of random selection, this survey released 230 questionnaires totally, at 10 July to 15 July. And 212 questionnaires were recovered. Deleting these invalid questionnaires, I gained 200 questionnaires eventually.

There are two main issues among data collection. First, the total samples of this study seems not enough. This research aims to measure whether E-governance will improve people’s trust in the Chinese government. But the sample of this study is restricted to Shanghai city, even though Shanghai city is a typical case. Second, the distribution and character of samples and parent population might have a gap. These issues may have a influence on the result of the research.

Variables operation

First, the independent variable is dived to two aspects, that are, entrepreneurial approach and participatory approach. Entrepreneurial approach includes two perspectives: ‘open data’ and ‘online service’. And this study uses two questions to operate each perspective. These questions are ‘how often you use the tools of E-governments’ and ‘in what extent are you satisfied with E-governments’. Second, dependent variable is that the level of people’s trust in governments. This variable can be measured by four perspectives, including ‘trust in honest’, ‘trust in functional performance’, ‘trust in democracy and law’, ‘trust in services attitude’. This article uses four points scale to measure each perspective’s conditions. And the sum of four perspectives’ points can be seen as the extent of people’s trust in the government (Table 1).

Table 1: Variables operation.

Data describe

The collected data shows that many of people have ever touched E-governments. Specifically, 15% of respondents often use online governments tools, 21% of them sometimes use online government tools, 54% of them use online government tools occasionally, and there are only 10% of respondents never use such tools. 10.5% of respondents often use online official services, 26% of them sometime use it, 47.5% of them use it occasionally, and there are 16% of respondents have never ever use online official services. Only 6% of respondents express opinion and take part in online discussion through E-governments platform, 15% of them sometimes do it, 46.5% of them do it occasionally, and there are 32.5% of respondents have never ever do it before. It is not difficult to find that ‘open data’ is the most popular function of E-governments that is used by citizens. And ‘online discussion’ is the least common function among E-governments (Table 2).

Table 2: The frequency of using E-governments.

Whether citizens are satisfied with online governments systems is one of the most important core questions. The data shows that: 21% of respondents are very satisfied with ‘open data’, 42% of them are satisfied with it, 21%n of them are unsatisfied with it, and only 16% of respondents are very unsatisfied with it. 16% of respondents are very satisfied with online services, 37.5% of the are satisfied with it, 29.5% of them are unsatisfied with it, and 16.5% of them are very satisfied with it. Only 7.5% of citizens are very satisfied with ‘online discussion’, 24.5% of them are satisfied with it. That means only 32% of respondents are show positive attitudes towards ‘online discussion’, which means up to 68% of citizens are not satisfied with it (Table 3).

Table 3: Attitude towards E-governments.

People’s trust in the Chinese government is the core elements of this research. From this data, we can find that: only 2.5% of respondents show their full trust in Chinese government’s honest, 24.5% of them trust in it, 45.5% of respondents disbelieve government’s honest, and 27.5% of them very disbelieve it. 13.5% of respondents very believe government’s function performances, and 39.5% believe it, which means 47% of respondents disbelieve government’s function performances. There are 6.5% of respondents show full trust in government’s democracy and law, and 19.0% of them believe it, which means there are 75.5% of respondents disbelieve it in different level. And there are 14% of respondents fully believe in government’s services attitude, 38% of them believe it, 35 of them disbelieve it, and there are 13% of respondents very disbelieve it. Form the data, we can find that people’s trust in Chinese government seems complex, that is, people’s attitude towards the government are very different in view of different aspects. On the whole, however, people’s trust in the governments are not optimistic (Table 4).

Table 4: People�s attitude towards the government.

The level of satisfied about E-governance and people’s trust in the government

Now, we will study whether the level of satisfied about E-governance has a relevance towards people’s trust in the government. First, through ANOVA test, we can judge if the different level of satisfied about ‘open data’ has significant different about people’s attitude towards the government. The specific data can be seen below (Table 5).

Table 5: The level of satisfied about �open data� and people�s trust in governments.

Second, through ANOVA test, we can judge if the different level of satisfied about ‘online services’ has significant different about people’s attitude towards the government. The specific data can be seen below (Table 6).

Table 6: The level of satisfied about �online services� and people�s trust in governments.

Third, through ANOVA test, we can judge if the different level of satisfied about ‘online discussions’ has significant different about people’s attitude towards the government. The specific data can be seen below (Table 7).

This article finds that the level of people’s satisfied about E-governance has a significant influence on the level of people’s trust in the government, which is same with other scholars’ studies [2,13]. But there are also some specific results found by this study [14-16].

First, the most important element that has a impact on people’s attitude towards the government is ‘online discussions’, which means a higher satisfied about ‘online discussions’ will directly lead to a higher level of people’s trust in the government. But what has be found from the questionnaires shows that most of respondents are not satisfied with the Chinese government’s performance [17]. The figure shows that only 7.5% of citizens feel very satisfied about the ‘online discussion’ and 24.5% of them are satisfied with it. That means up to 68% of citizens are unsatisfied with the Chinese government’s performance of ‘online discussion’. This phenomenon might be caused by two reasons. 1. There are not enough platforms that allow citizens to take part in public discussion or pass opinion about public policies and affairs. 2. The Chinese government has not shown enough concentration and emphasis towards ‘online discussion’ [18-20]. Nowadays, with the development of Internet technologies, the Chinese government has more rich and advanced means to promote ‘online discussion’, such as official Weibo, and official Wechat. But, the government only use these tools as the tool of releasing information and data. The government has not really responded citizens’ opinion or built these tools as Habermas’s public sphere, where citizens can take part in public discussions and pass their opinion about the government’s performances and other public agendas.

Second, comparing to ‘open data’, ‘online services’ seems having a deeper impact on people’s attitude towards the government. Some reasons about the low level impact of ‘open data’ has been mentioned above, now, I will discuss the reason why ‘online service’ seems more important. With the development of ICTs, people’s daily life has been changed a lot [21]. The reliance of smart phones, or internet, is the typical one. Thus, citizens want to handle more businesses though internet, instead of going though in persons. So if the government can provide better ‘online services’, the level of people’s trust in government will be improved. But, from this questionnaire, it is not difficult to find that the level of people’s satisfied about ‘online services’ is not very high, which should be valued by the Chinese government [22,23].

From this study, we can respond the research questions. First, there is a strong relation between E-governance and the level of people’s trust in the Chinese government. And what should be emphasized here is that E-governance has a positive impact on, in some extent, people’s attitude towards the government. But, the Chinese government should clearly recognized, according to this research, that the total level of people’s satisfied about E-government, including two approaches, is not very high.

Second, both of entrepreneurial approach and participatory approach have an impact on the level of people’s trust in the government. But, the aspect of ‘open data’ has no significant impact on people’s attitude. It might because that more and more people see ‘open data’ as governments’ a basic responsibility, which means people’s attitude towards the government will not be changed significantly, even though the Chinese government do a good job about ‘open data’. But in another situation that the Chinese government has a bad performance among ‘open data’, such as hiding data and materials, will lead to the decline of people’s trust in government. ‘online services’ plays an important role in the level of people’s attitude towards the government. Thanks for the development of ICTs, the Chinese government has a lot of new tools to improve the quality of ‘online services’. And, if these people who are satisfied with the government’s ‘online services’ will show more trust in the government. But, what should be point out is that, the level of people’s satisfied about ‘online services’ is not very high. In addition, the level of satisfied about ‘online discussions’ plays a most important role in people’s attitude towards the Chinese government. That means people’s value participatory approach better than entrepreneurial approach. And, citizens do not want to take E-governments only as a tool of information and data released. They prefer use E-governance as the approach that lead them to public policies and public discussions more smoothly. And they want the Chinese government’s responses.

Third, the Chinese government’s performance about E-governance is not very good, although E-government has a positive impact on people’s attitude towards the government. In the future, the Chinese government should improve their performance about E-governance though these two ways. 1. The government should use valuable ICTs tools, improving the quality of ‘online services’. From the questionnaire’s result, it is not difficult to find that many of Shanghai citizens are unsatisfied with the ‘online services’ today. 2. Let citizens take part in public discussions and respond them timely are very important. E-participation, or E-democracy, is the core element of E-governance. But, the Chinese government today not shows enough attention to it. E-governments is a good way to improve the level of people’s trust in the Chinese government. But, the Chinese government needs to do better.

¹Proposing by the government of Obama in 2012. The main aims of the plan of open government are opening data and materials to every citizens, and let them take part in public affairs.

²i.e., Welch has proposed some questions to measure people’s trust in American
government. There are these questions. a). How much of the time do you think you can trust the government in Washington to do what is right-just about always, most of the time, or only some of the time, for none of them; b). Would you say the government is pretty much run by a few big interests looking out for themselves or that it is run for the benefit of all the people?; c). Do you think that people in the government waste a lot of money we pay in taxes, waste some of it, or don’t waste very much of it? d). Do you think that quite a few of the people running the government are crooked, not very many are, or hardly any of them are crooked?