1. Introduction
China has achieved great success in economic development in the past 30 years; the average growth rate of the GDP is higher than9% [
1,
2]. However, there are numerous studies that state that China’s rapid growth is at the cost of resource consumption and environmental pollution, which cause serious economic losses, social conflicts and health costs in China [
3,
4]. Air, water, soil, photochemical, and noise pollution is serious in China, and the negative and persistent effects on people’s health over a long period have been confirmed [
5,
6]. For example, according to a report by the World Bank, China has been the largest contributor of sulphur oxides and chlorofluorocarbons to the atmosphere since 2001 [
7]. By using the quasi-experiment of China’s Huai River Policy, Chen et al. (2013) [
8] found that air pollution had a significant negative effect on people’s life expectancies (about 5.5 years less). Furthermore, as one of the most important momentums of economic growth, rapid urbanization results in tremendous pressure on waste disposal, which is a considerable challenge for soil protection and food security in China [
9]. In this case, Khan et al. (2008) [
10] confirmed that the heavy metals in contaminated soils had significant health risks for Chinese people. In addition to physical health, mental health is also affected by pollution. The PM2.5 in smog can impact the human brain structure, which further negatively affects people’s moods and cognitive competence [
11,
12]. Granieri (2015) also indicates that asbestos exposure has a negative impact on the physical health of the population and on its psychological and community components [
13].
Although numerous studies have investigated the effects of environmental pollution on people’s health, much fewer concerns are expressed regarding the impact on political issues. In political regimes, political trust is a central component of the study [
14,
15]. According to the definition of Miller and Listhaug (1990) [
16], political trust is the “judgment of the citizenry that the system and the political incumbents are responsive, and will do what is right even in the absence of constant scrutiny”. Political trust has been confirmed with substantial effects on the design and execution of public policy [
17], the establishment and maintaining of good democratic governance [
18], and the success of building a competent state in the background of globalization [
19]. Political trust, in this regard, emerges as one of the most important factors upon which the legitimacy and sustainability of political systems are built. Even though China generally is not considered as a democracy [
20,
21], sufficient political trust and popular support should also be important factors affecting sociopolitical stability and persistent economic growth.
In current research, two theories compete as explanations for the origins of political trust, one is
Cultural Theories, and another one is
Institutional Theories. In
Cultural Theories, trust in political institutions is hypothesized to be exogenous [
22]. On the contrary, the
Institutional Theories hold that citizens’ political trust is endogenous to the performance of the political system [
23,
24]. By using the Fall of Communism in Europe as a quasi-experiment, Mishler and Rose (2001) [
25] concluded that the
Institutional Theories are superior in explaining the origins of political trust. This means that political trust will vary with citizens’ satisfaction of the function and efficiency of the political system [
26,
27]. The persistent decline in political trust in western democracy countries since the mid-1960s also provides supportive evidence of the
Institutional Theories [
28,
29].
Different from the ubiquitous downward trend in the advanced industrialized democracies, the political trust in China was maintained at a high level for quite a long time. Wang (2005) [
15] indicated that the rapid economic development is the key reason that greatly enhances public support for the government. Recently, however, the level of political trust in China has been in decline. The rapid modernization promotes citizens’ higher expectation for public goods provided by the government. The slowing-down of economic growth, the widespread official corruption, and citizens’ increasing sense of political empowerment erode the Chinese government’s political legitimacy and regime stability [
21,
30]. Nevertheless, the impacts of environmental pollution and ecological hazards on political trust are insufficiently discussed.
Environmental rights are basic and fundamental human rights [
31]. The government is responsible for protecting citizens’ environmental rights and for challenging all threats to environmental resources. Once environmental rights are abused, people can personally perceive the undesirable consequences, disappointment and sense of deprivation that follow. Guglielmucciet al. (2015) carefully review related literature and demonstrated that technological disasters and industrial pollution usually lead to anxiety, somatization, rage, depression and post-traumatic conditions, which undermine victims’ own sense of psychic integrity [
32].If the government cannot effectively resolve the problems, or more seriously, those problems are in fact induced by the government, it is a reasonable prediction that citizens’ confidence and trust of the government would be significantly reduced[
33].
This paper aims to investigate whether and to what extent environmental pollution can decrease citizens’ political trust. Considering that environmental pollution disasters are more likely to be perceived by citizens, the occurrence of emerging environmental events is used to measure the extent of environmental pollution. Based on a widely used survey database, the China Family Panel Study, we conduct empirical analyses based on the Ologit model. The results confirm that citizens in regions with more serious environmental pollution disasters expressed weaker supportive attitudes toward the government. Furthermore, we realize that the estimated relationship may suffer from endogeneity problems. To alleviate the concern of the endogeneity issues, we adopt a change model and Lewbel’s constructed instrument method and include possibly omitted variables. A battery of tests suggests that the negative association between environmental pollution disasters and citizens’ political trust is robust with respect to possible endogeneity issues.
In subsequent path analyses, we further explore possible mechanisms of the relationship between environmental pollution disasters and political trust. The empirical results indicate that citizens’ environmental awareness is a significant mediation. This confirms our prediction that the occurrence of environmental pollution disasters can inspire citizens’ critical awareness of environmental issues, which further negatively affect their political trust. In addition, we also investigate the moderating effects of citizens’ traits on the relationship between environmental pollution disasters and political trust. Specifically, a group of individual characteristics, such as gender, age, education level, income level, and political identity, is tested. The empirical results show that the political supportive level of female and party member citizens is less likely to be affected by environmental pollution disaster events.
Finally, we check whether the government’s positive response to the environmental pollution disasters can mitigate the negative effects on citizens’ political trust. Specific to this study, two factors are considered: governments’ attitudes and efforts in resolving environmental problems. We find that in regions where local governments have more communication with citizens about environmental issues or invest more in governing environmental pollution, the negative effects of environmental pollution disasters are less pronounced because the residents have recognized the governments’ responsiveness and efforts in solving environmental problems.
This study contributes to the existing literature in several ways. First, unlike most previous studies that focus on the effect of environmental pollution on people’s health, our study chooses to conduct analyses from the perspective of political trust. Our study provides direct evidence that environmental pollution affects not only citizens’ health but also people’s political trust. In addition to confirming the negative effects of environmental pollution disasters on political trust, we also find that this relationship varies with citizens’ characteristics.
Second, we examine the influence channel and provide some applicable ways to diminish the negative influence. Instead of the physical health channel, the increase in citizens’ environmental awareness is confirmed as a significant mechanism. This shows that the influence of shocks on the mind induced by disastrous environmental events is the main driving factor that decreases political trust. In the case where citizens’ environmental awareness and critical sense increase, concealing information or trying to fool citizens should be bad choices. Instead, more effective communication and positive actions in resolving environmental problems may be much more effective ways to redeem a damaged reputation.
Third, to our knowledge, this study is the first to use the context of China, the largest emerging market and the second largest economy, to examine the impacts of environmental pollution disasters on citizens’ political trust. Political trust is a traditional but important research topic. However, there have been a limited number of empirical studies on political trust in China [
21]. In consideration that there are significant differences in institutional settings and political systems, the findings derived from developed countries may not fit well with those from underdeveloped or developing countries. As a result, focusing on the context of China, which is regarded as the largest developing country, our study adds to the extant literature on the political consequence of serious environmental pollution.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows.
Section 2 introduces some historical environmental pollution disaster events and institutional background of China.
Section 3 discusses the data, measurement methods, and empirical models used in this study.
Section 4 reports the empirical results and our main findings.
Section 5 presents additional analyses and a variety of robustness checks. Finally,
Section 6 draws some conclusions and discusses the limitations.
2. Institutional Background
In the early 20th century, several disastrous environmental pollution events happened in developed countries, such as the London Smog Disasters [
34], Los Angeles Smog [
35], and Japan Minamata Disease events [
36]. These events are not merely historic stories. They spurred the citizens’ realization of the harm of pollution and significantly improved people’s environmental awareness. Some events even greatly accelerated the perfection of the legal system (such as the pass of Clean Air Act in the United Kingdom and U.S.).
As the largest developing country, China now faces similar problems. Its miraculous growth in economics encompasses high investment, high resource consumption and high pollutant emissions [
4,
37]. Recently, a number of environmental pollution disasters occurred across vast parts of China [
38,
39]. For example, in 2004, one firm, Sichuan Chemical Co., Ltd. (Chengdu, China), illegally emitted waste water into the Tuojiang River, resulting in severe contamination. This event caused over 300 million RMB direct economic losses, and more than one million citizens’ water supplies were cut off. Subsequent reports indicate that at least 5 years are required to recover the ecological environment. Another typical event occurred in 2005. The explosion of a factory of the China Petroleum Group led to 76 civilian casualties. In addition, over 100 tons of organic pollutants flowed into the Songhua River, which caused very serious consequences. The security of water of several cities along the riverside was threatened, and millions of residents’ daily lives were affected. Some rumors of the severity of this event even caused panic through the buying of drinking water. This event also polluted the downstream regions in the KhabarovskKrai of Russia and caused serious negative international effects. Later, the State Council of China punished 12 responsible persons, and the director of China’s State Environmental Protection Administration (predecessor of current Ministry of Environmental Protection) had to take responsibility and resign. In the following 5 years, 7.84 billion RMB were invested in the treatment of the pollution of the Songhua River. Compared with the inconspicuous pollution in daily lives, these disastrous environmental pollution events usually cause immediate losses and induce much greater social shocks [
40,
41,
42].
To properly monitor and cope with these environmental pollution disasters, in 2005, the Ministry of Environmental Protection issued the National Contingency Plan for Emergent Environmental Events (hereafter Contingency Plan). The Contingency Plan formally names these momentous pollution events as “emergent environmental events”, and provides specific definition and identifying criterions. According to the Contingency Plan, emergent environmental events are “… those events caused by pollutant emission, natural events or industrial accidents, which may decrease environmental quality, endanger citizens’ health and property safety, induce ecological destruction, or trigger significant social impacts”.
The
Contingency Plan classifies emergent environmental events into four levels by the influential scope, severity and losses of events: extremely severe events (Level I), severe events (Level II), large events (Level III), and general events (Level IV). Please refer to
Appendix B for the detailed assessment criteria of the levels of emergent environmental events.
Table 1 provides the detailed statistics of the occurrence of emergent environmental events for each province in 2011 and 2013. (Due to a lack of space, only the statistics of emergent environmental events in study sample periods are presented. Other data are available on the website of the National Bureau of Statistics of China (
www.stats.gov.cn).) We can see that there are significant regional differences in the distribution of emergent environmental events, which provide a good setting to test our inferences.
4. Empirical Results
4.1. Descriptive Statistics
Table 2 provides the summary statistics of key variables. The average political trust level is 4.910. Considering that
Trust ranges from zero to ten, it shows that Chinese citizens’ political trust level is relatively low. The top quartile of
Conflict equals 1, which indicates that at least 25% people heard or personally experienced adverse conflicts with governments.
With respect to individual characteristics, 52% respondents in our sample are male, and the average Age is 25.89. The mean value and top quartile of Educ are 2.63 and 3, respectively, which shows that most people in our sample did not receive higher education. We can see that 45% respondents are working in non-agricultural jobs, and 43% people hold urban hukou. The mean values of Income and Status are 2.4 and 2.81, respectively. The Party statistics show that 2% of the respondents in our sample are party members.
Table 3 provides the Pearson correlations of variables. The key variables of interest in our study are occurrence of emergent environmental events (
Disasters) and citizens’ political trust level (
Trust). The correlation matrix shows that the
Disasters variable is negatively correlated with
Trust, providing preliminary support for our prediction. Furthermore, the correlation coefficients among most control variables are generally low. The variance inflation factors (VIF) of all independent variables are far below 10, implying that there is no serious multicollinearity problem [
62].
4.2. Regression Results
The baseline regression results of the effects of environmental pollution disasters on citizens’ political trust are represented in
Table 4. In column (1), we run a single regression without control variables. In column (2), we incorporate individual level variables. In column (3), we further control for several aspects of regional disparities. In column (4), we control for year and regional fixed effects. We find that all coefficients of
Disasters are statistically significant. This shows that consistent with our intuition, with more environmental pollution disasters, citizens tend to distrust the government.
As for the control variables, most results are consistent with previous studies [
63,
64,
65]. For example, the coefficient of
Gender is significantly negative, which is consistent with the idea that men hold more distrustful opinions of government than women in China [
63]. Both coefficients of
Age and
Age2 are significant but with contradictory symbols, which suggest a U-shape relationship between citizens’ age and political trust. This result is consistent with the previous finding that, in the developing world, age has a nonlinear impact on political trust [
64]. The positive coefficient of
Income and negative coefficient of
Educ also confirm the conclusion that higher income levels are usually associated with higher political trust, but higher education with lower trust [
65]. Similar to
Income, the estimated coefficient of
Status is also positive and significant. Both higher income and social status make people feel satisfied with current life, and prompt trust of the government.
For party members, it is not surprising to find their significantly higher political trust level under the condition that the communist party has worked as the ruling party for over 60 years. In China, a large portion of various organizations is under the regulation of the government, or directly founded by the government’s affiliations. Hence, most of them have statutes to guide members’ “sense of political correctness” in China, which is in support of the governance of the communist party and government. In addition, joining associations can be good opportunities to build political connections with the government, which may bring potential benefits. This underlying conflict of interest may also improve their preference in trusting government.
Interestingly, we find that the coefficients of Urban and Job are both negative, which indicate that rural citizens and people who work in the agricultural industry have higher political trust levels. There are two possible reasons: First, the Chinese government’s consistent preferential policies in supporting the development of rural places and agricultural industries. For example, in 2014, over 50 farmer-benefitting policies were issued or updated, and more than 200 billion RMB were directly subsidized to farmers. These favorable policies may be important driven factors of farmers’ high political trust. Second: relatively lower costs of living in rural places. The pressure of survival for citizens living in cities is much more intense, especially in the background of the Chinese urban property price, which is too expensive to afford. In contrast, people living in the country are less likely to feel anxious complain about the government’s administrative performance.
For the regional variables, we can see that their coefficients are all significant in column (3), which indicates that these factors indeed have effects on citizens’ political trust. The coefficients are insignificant in column (4), indicating that these factors have been included in regional fixed effects.
4.3. Endogeneity
To summarize, the main regressions preliminary support our prediction. However, as with any empirical research, there are several caveats. First of all, there could be some unmeasurable individual-level characteristics that are related to both political trust and environmental pollution disasters, which may lead to omitted variable bias. Second, although most emergent environmental events are unpredictable, we should admit that they cannot be seen as pure exogenous events. The possibly related regional differences, such as the ruling efficiency of government, the momentum of economic development, and social atmosphere, are difficult to measure and perfectly control. Even though we have controlled for regional fixed effects, it may not be enough.
To eliminate the interference of those individual and regional characteristics that are stable but unobservable, we employ a change analysis to explore the effect of environmental pollution disasters on citizens’ political trust. The CFPS-12 and CFPS-14 provide us a strongly balanced short panel to conduct change analysis. Δ denotes the changes in corresponding variables between CFPS-12 and CFPS-14. Those indicator variables with little time variants, such as
Gender,
Educ, and Region dummies, are not included in the regression of change analysis.
Table 5 provides the results of the change analysis. As shown, the regression coefficient of Δ
Disasters is significantly negative, which indicates a negative relationship between environmental pollution disasters and political trust. This result supports our main finding.
Furthermore, we also apply IV regression to mitigate the endogeneity concerns. Considering the extreme difficulties in finding valid instruments, we adopt a technique developed by Rigobon (2003) [
66], as applied by Lewbel (2012) [
67], which exploit the presence of heteroskedasticity in the regression residuals [
68,
69,
70,
71].
Because this approach is not well known, we first provide a brief intuitive discussion. Assume that we are interested in estimating the following model:
where
is the endogenous variable and
is a matrix of exogenous variables. In addition to the standard assumptions that
and
are uncorrelated with
and are also uncorrelated with each other (i.e.,
), if we add an assumption in the presence of heteroskedasticity (i.e.,
), then we can use
as an instrument for
. The reason is that assuming that
can guarantee that
is uncorrelated with
(the exogeneity condition for valid instruments), whereas the presence of heteroskedasticity (
) can guarantee that
is correlated with
(the relevance condition). Fulfilling these two conditions ensures the validity of
. In short, this method can generate valid instruments if the existing of heteroskedasticity is confirmed.
In an untabulated analysis, we confirm the presence of heteroskedasticity in model (4) (
), which makes us confident in using Lewbel’s method. The IV regression results are reported in
Table 6. They show that
Disasters have negative and statistically significant effect on the political trust.
Finally, to mitigate the endogeneity caused by possibly omitted correlated variables, we add to the empirical model a number of variables, including degree of corruption, social trust level, religious atmosphere, and Confucianism, which may potentially affect both the occurrence of environmental pollution disasters and citizens’ political trust.
Numerous studies have documented the negative effects of corruption on citizens’ supportive attitudes of the government [
65,
72,
73,
74,
75]. One important reason is that corruption would make the government operate inefficiently. Under this condition, the weakening in the monitoring function of government may increase the possibility of the occurrence of environmental pollution disasters. Therefore, the corruption level in different provinces is included. We check the
China Procuratorate Yearbook issued by China Supreme People’s Procuratorate, and use the number of cases on government officials’ corruption and misconducts to measure the corruption level in each province.
Another possible factor is social trust. Kaase (1999) [
76] found a significant positive relationship between interpersonal trust and political trust. On the other side, higher social trust usually relates to higher social capital, which can be an effective force to suppress unsocial activities [
77]. Therefore, following the measuring methods of Wu et al. (2014) [
78], we use the people’s enthusiasm in voluntary blood donations to measure social trust.
Lehrer (2004) [
79] indicates that religion has a significant influence on various economic and demographic behaviors of individuals and families. Several studies confirm that religion affects both individual’s political activism and environmental awareness [
80,
81]. Therefore, we also incorporate the religious atmosphere into the regression. Following Chen et al. (2013) [
82] and Du et al. (2014) [
83],
Religion is measured as the proportion of religious members in the provincial-level Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.
In addition to religion, the cultural atmosphere may also greatly affect people’s attitudes and activities. According to the Cultural theories, trust in political institutions is hypothesized to originate outside the political sphere in long-standing and deeply seeded beliefs about people that are rooted in cultural norms. Therefore, we also try to address this potential concern. As the most influential cultural school, Confucianism has guided Chinese people’s attitudes and behaviors for thousands years [
84]. (We should acknowledge that it is quite difficult to control for all cultural factors in China. In different regions, various local cultures and traditions exist. Hence, it is nearly impossible to control them exhaustively. However, controlling for regional fixed effects may partially eliminate the concern. We sincerely appreciate one referee’s comments on the discussion of cultural influence.) Confucian philosophy emphasizes the importance of trust in others and elevates it to one of the eight basic moral principles [
85]. Tan and Tambyah (2011) [
86] also demonstrate the important influence of Confucianism on both generalized trust and political trust. Hence, the influence of Confucianism is also under consideration. Du (2014) [
87] summarizes seven Confucianism centers: Lu (Qufu of Shandong Province), Luo (Luoyang of Henan Province), Shu (Chengdu of Sichuan Province), Min (Sanming and Longyan of Fujian Province), Taizhou (Dongtai of Jiangsu Province), Zhedong (Eastern regions of Zhejiang Province such as Ningbo and Shaoxing), and Linchuan (Linchuan of Jiangxi Province), in where citizens are more likely to be influenced by the philosophy of Confucianism. Following his method,
Confucianism equals one if people live in the above-mentioned provinces, and zero otherwise.
The results are presented in
Table 7. They show that, after controlling for these variables, there is still a strong negative relationship between environmental pollution disasters and political trust.
4.4. Robustness
We further conduct a series of robustness checks and report the results in
Table 8:
- (1)
As mentioned before, we calculate
Disasters based on different weights on different levels of emergent events. For robustness, we alternatively use different weight methods or directly adopt the number of emergent events to measure the severity of environmental pollution disasters. The results are reported in Panel A of
Table 8. The conclusions are the same as those presented before.
- (2)
To eliminate the concern of potential serial correlation issues, we re-run regressions after clustering by region or by individual. The results are reported in Panel B of
Table 8.These treatments make above results even more statistical significant.
- (3)
Considering that local pollution conditions may also affect citizens’ political trust, we incorporate this factor as a control variable. Because it is quite difficult to use one variable as a proxy for the regional pollution condition, we use several variables as proxies for different types of pollution. The severity of air pollution is measured by using the emission amount of sulfur dioxide. The severity of water pollution is measured by using the emission amount of waste water. The severity of soil pollution is measured by using the increasing amount of land desertification. The results are reported in Panel C of
Table 8. After solely or simultaneously controlling for these variables, our results still hold.
- (4)
We further control for some possibly related regional characteristics, such as the unemployment rate, crime rate, and efficiency of the transportation system. The results are reported in Panel D of
Table 8.Generally, after controlling for all above variables, there is no qualitative change in our findings.
- (5)
Considering that citizens in Beijing can simultaneously perceive the influence of the local Beijing government and the central government of China, their political trust level may be quite different from other citizens. To address this potential effect, we drop the observations pertaining to living in Beijing and re-run the regression. The result is presented in Panel E of
Table 8. We can see that our conclusion still holds. (We acknowledge one referee’s comments pointing out this limit.)
6. Discussion and Conclusions
This research indicates that the occurrence of environmental pollution disasters is negatively related to citizens’ political trust. This result still holds after controlling for endogeneity issues and a series of robustness tests. In the analysis of possible mechanisms, we find that increasing of citizens’ environmental awareness is a significant mediation. Possible moderating effects of demographical variables are also tested. Male citizens and non-party member citizens are more responsive to environmental pollution disasters. With these conclusions, the environmental problems not only harm people’s health but also threaten sustainability and competency of the political system. Therefore, environmental protection should not only be health or social issues, but also be an important political topic. This finding can be applied by policy-makers worldwide for promoting environmental protection policies.
In addition, this study further finds the negative relationship between environmental pollution disasters and political trust is less pronounced when government communicate more with citizens about environmental issues or invest more money in governing pollution. Given the results, the positive attitudes and efforts in resolving problems may partially restore citizens’ trust following the occurrence of environmental pollution disasters. Therefore, when environmental pollution disasters have happened, this finding provides some efficient ways to reduce the negative effect of emergent environmental events on government reputation.
Similar to all empirical studies, this study has some limitations. First, we do not differentiate various types of environmental pollution disasters. The Ministry of Environmental Protection discloses the statistics on the occurrence of environmental pollution disasters on its website (
www.zhb.gov.cn) every year. However, only some severe cases are simultaneously disclosed in detail, and the specific information of most emergent environmental events is missing. The inaccessibility of data deters our further investigation from this perspective. Second, there still are deficiencies in the measurement of political trust. As we mentioned before, we cannot directly evaluate the citizens’ trust of central government or the whole political institution. In addition, trust is also a multi-dimensional terminology, which includes at least three dimensions–ability, benevolence, and integrity. As a national survey, CFPS can hardly cover all these aspects. We greatly encourage and appreciate following studies to fix these deficiencies.