Abstract:

 Confidence in government is a key indicator of government image.The building of government image and the evaluation of people’sconfidence in governmentare currently hot topics for academic circles and the Government of China.The existing literature and empirical studies indicate that public confidence in governments, western or Chinese, follows a gradually decliningtrend; with the participation of the new media like the Internet, government image becomes increasinglytransparent andspecific and the gap between the actual performance of governments in the process of administration and the threshold of public expectation adds to the distrustin governments.Attribution Theory and Halo Effect can better account for the correlation between government image and public trust, thus we can improve public confidence in governments accordingly and select an appropriate route for the reform of a government’s administrative system. Taking those public servants representative of government image as the benchmark measurement unit, the data collected from the CSS2013 questionnaire indicates a strong positive correlation between Chinese government image and public confidence in the government.

Key words: government image, empirical study, confidence in the government