Crisis and Correction: Do Government Rectification Efforts Restore Citizen Trust After Governance Failure?

In a substantial literature on political trust in normal times, we know little about the impact on trust of crises or subsequent government efforts at correction. We investigate these impacts by analyzing a pair of similar governance failures in China, a strong single-party authoritarian state with high levels of political trust and sophisticated tools to manage negative information about its performance. We theorize that how citizens update beliefs about government trustworthiness depends on prior experience: firsthand knowledge and anecdotal evidence supply powerful “insider” information that citizens bring to their processing of news. We leverage occurrence of two exogenous shocks—a vaccine crisis and a subsequent government correction—with administration of a face-to-face, nationally representative survey in 2018. We find: (1) the 2018 crisis reduced trust, regardless of prior experience; and (2) the subsequent correction did not increase trust for “insiders,” residing in cities exposed to a similar crisis and correction in 2016, but did increase trust for other citizens. We show that governance failure is not a singular event concluded with crisis weathered and trust rebuilt through corrective efforts. Instead, it introduces a persistent constraint on the persuasiveness of government claims of trustworthiness. Past governance failures persist in social perceptions and are reactivated by similar failures, with attention to one failure elevated in the long term for citizens familiar with it from experience.