Belief Updating in a Biased Information Environment: Evidence From Hierarchical Government Satisfaction in Vietnam

Abstract

<p>People tend to hold more positive attitude to central government relative to local governments in east Asian single-party regimes. Drawing from political psychology literature, I argue the information environment biased against local governments shaped people’s political attitude, and ultimately contributed to this hierarchical structure of governmental satisfaction. By exploiting a quasi-exogenous variation of intensity of censorship in rural Vietnam, this article shows that an information environment more biased against local governments may lead to a larger difference in satisfaction to central relative to local governments. It is also displayed that people with higher-level of education are more susceptible to this biased information environment.</p>