Does the Medium Matter? Linking Citizens’ Use of Communication Platform for Information about Urban Policies to Decision to Trust in Local Government

Abstract

Information plays a formative role in citizens’ decision to trust their government. Given an increasingly diverse information environment, which is attributable to the diffusion of information and communication technologies (ICT)s, the Internet, and social media, we hypothesize that citizens’ use of a particular medium for information (online vs offline, and government source vs. non-government source) about their government plays an important and distinctive role in shaping citizens’ satisfaction with government information provision and trust in government. To address this central hypothesis, we analyze data from the 3068 citizen respondents. The findings of our study reveal that citizens’ use of the online medium for information about their government, such as information from local government web-media, lacks a strong relationship with their levels of satisfaction with government information provision and trust in government, while citizens’ use of different sources on the offline medium for information about their government, such as information from local government meeting or official gazette, is found to have a stronger association with citizens’ trust in government and satisfaction with government information provision.