Lockdown, information quality, and political trust: An empirical study of the Shanghai lockdown under COVID-19
| Published date | 01 March 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00208523231166254 |
| Author | Yida Zhai,Guanghua Han |
| Date | 01 March 2024 |
Lockdown, information
quality, and political trust:
An empirical study of the
Shanghai lockdown under
COVID-19
Yida Zhai
School of International and Public Affairs, Shanghai Jiao Tong
University, China
Guanghua Han
School of International and Public Affairs, Shanghai Jiao Tong
University, China
Abstract
Many countries have adopted various measures to curb the spread of the COVID-19
pandemic. The regulation measures of lockdown have triggered changes in public polit-
ical trust in the government (including in its competence, benevolence and integrity).
Information shapes the attitudes and values of residents; this paper aims to study the
effect of a lockdown on political trust and the moderating effect from quality of govern-
ment shared information. From 12 March to 31 May 2022, Shanghai implemented strict
lockdown measures. In this study, we randomly sampled the participation information of
1063 participants. Data-based regression analysis shows that lockdown has had a nega-
tive impact on all subcategories of political trust. However, timely and accuracy informa-
tion weakens its negative effect. The accuracy of information moderates the relationship
between lockdown and political trust in competence and integrity, while a sufficient sup-
ply of information moderates the relationship between lockdown and political trust in
benevolence.
Corresponding author:
Guanghua Han, Xin Jian Hall, 1954 Huashan Road, Shanghai 200030, China.
Email: hanguanghua@sjtu.edu.cn
Article
International
Review of
Administrative
Sciences
International Review of Administrative
Sciences
2024, Vol. 90(1) 132–148
© The Author(s) 2023
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/00208523231166254
journals.sagepub.com/home/ras
Points for practitioners
This study explores how different dimensions of information quality affect each compo-
nent public’s political trust, and thereby inspires practitioners to strategically improve
information communication in crisis.
Keywords
COVID-19 pandemic, information quality, lockdown, political trust
Introduction
Similar to many global plagues throughout history, the outbreak of COVID-19 has
harmed many people. To curb the spread of COVID-19, many countries have asked indi-
viduals to maintain social distancing to control the spread of the virus in the community,
and different countries have adopted different physical isolation management methods
(Xie et al., 2022). For example, there are restrictions on going out to buy food and medi-
cine in Malaysia, closures of provinces in Italy and restrictions on activities involving
gatherings in South Korea. Since March 2022, the highly contagious Omicron variant
has appeared in China, and the number of cases of infection has increased dramatically.
As the financial and commercial center of China, Shanghai imposed a city-wide lock-
down that began in the Pudong District on 29 March and was followed by the Puxi
District on 1 April. The lockdown lasted for more than 60 days, until the city was grad-
ually opened up, starting on 1 June. Residents had been ordered to stay in their homes all
this time, except for COVID-19 testing. Because businesses were shut down and supply
chains disrupted, the residents in this thriving city were short of a basic supply of foods,
income, medicine and other necessities at certain levels. In the world’s largest-scale pan-
demic lockdown by far, 25 million residents of this bustling commercial city suddenly
became the most miserable people in China.
Plague usually leads to death, the secondary disasters and social regulation chaos can
change the ruling foundation, as well as political histories, of the regime in a short time.
Political trust can bring administrative confidence in government competence, enhance
people’s compliance with regulations, and solicit public collaboration to deal with
crisis. Therefore, political trust during large-scale pandemics has always been an import-
ant issue of concern to scientific researchers. Past experience has shown that when an
entire society unites to cope with the crisis, trust in the government will increase
(Toya and Skidmore, 2014). Due to educational, cultural and economic differences
among residents, people can hold various attitudes with respect to lockdown measures
(Agrawal et al., 2020; Shareef et al., 2021). This also explains why the political impact
of lockdown is inconsistent with bias and controversy in different countries (Amat
et al., 2020; Jahn, 2022; Milfont, 2022). Researchers have proposed explanations of pol-
itical trust in a broad sense in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic (Robinson et al.,
2021; Schraff, 2021). However, trust in government consists of three categories: that is,
Zhai and Han133
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