An Empirical Study On Correlation Between Political Efficacy And Political Trust

Political trust is beliefs or faith that government and political system would operate with what people are expecting in their inner center. In the days with democracy’s growing, political trust has become the security of spiritual support. As for political efficacy, it is the inner perception and judgment that people think about what their political behavior can do on the whole political process. And as for an attitude variable, it has become the focus of attention of many scholars to measure if does really get the relationship with political trust, and how would this relationship would be.Based on this, my paper would aim to study the correlation between political efficacy and political trust, which involves the following issues:to measure people’s current political efficacy; to analysis factors which would influence political efficacy; to measure the level of people’s current political trust; and to analysis the correlation between political trust and political efficacy.Based on the research project of "Political Trust", the paper collects relative data of people’s evaluation on the political system, government agencies, political system, political parties and political actors through empirical research methods, survey tools and investigations into the citizens within the Outer Ring Road of Chengdu. What’s more, the paper uses SPSS (21.0) statistical software for data processing and analysis that includes Descriptive Statistical or Analysis, One-Way ANOVA, Cross-Table Analysis, Factor Analysis, Multiple Linear Regression Analysis etc. The results showed, People’s political efficacy (including internal and external) is generally low, and lower than the overall average under the circumstance of China; besides, there’s somehow difference in the variables which can affect the internal political efficacy and external political efficacy:There is a certain correlation between people’s age, the current economic compared to five years ago, personal interest in politics and external political efficacy; but as for internal political efficacy, the influenced factors would be gender, age, educational level, interest in politics and party affiliation. What’s more, the paper conducted Factor Analysis to reduce the dimension during the measurement of political trust, which divided the political trust into political trust in central and political trust in local:Which, on the whole, the public trust in central is higher than trust in local; and as for the correlation between political trust and political efficacy, we should explain separately:there is actually certain positive correlation between External political efficacy and political trust (including the political trust in central and which in local), which means the stronger external political efficacy is, the higher political trust is; however as for internal political efficacy, the correlation is actually certain negative between them.Therefore, the conclusions of the study is there is actually some correlation between political efficacy and political trust, but we should pay more attention on the influence made from external political efficacy which would means a lot to us. At the same time, we can enhance political trust through improve the public’s external political efficacy during the building in the political trust process.