Abstract：Hierarchical governmental trust is a key academic concept that has been developed on and tested with China’s original political practice. Despite a growing number of studies on hierarchical governmental trust in China’s research field, there has been limited discussions on this concept and its theoretical connotations in the international mainstream literature of comparative politics (mainly due to some critical but unclarified theoretical and methodological issues). A thorough review of existing scholarship on hierarchical governmental trust, with a particular emphasis on clarifying some concerning crucial theoretical and methodological issues, should be of great value for furthering the understanding of this critical political attitude of the Chinese people, enriching the understanding of a key micro-logic of China’s political practice, and enhancing the scholarly-added value of this theoretical concept. After reviewing most prominent theoretical and empirical researches on hierarchical governmental trust over the past decades, a configurational approach to examine its ecological structure, origins, and consequences has been forcefully argued for. It has been further emphasized that: (1) configurational differences are key to examining the ecological structure of hierarchical governmental trust; (2) regional differences are central to scrutinizing the origins and the evolution of hierarchical governmental trust; and (3) the differences between trust and distrust are crucial to analyzing the behavioral consequences of hierarchical governmental trust. Using multiple waves of national surveys between the early 2000s and 2020 and related census data, the validity, salience, and the significance of the proposed configurational approach, and the aforementioned arguments have been illustrated.
Lv Jie,Liu Tianxiang. The Micro-Ecological Structure of Hierarchical Governmental Trust and its Derivative Logic: A Configurational Approach[J]. Journal of Peking University(Philosophy and Social Sciences), 2022, 59(5): 107-118.
