ABSTRACT Using data from the 2014 China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), this paper examines how clan culture influences trust in local government and explores the mechanisms underlying this relationship. The results show a significant positive effect: Stronger clan culture is associated with higher levels of trust in local government. Robustness checks and instrumentalvariable estimates corroborate the main findings. The mechanism analysis indicates that clan culture enhances trust in local government through three channels: strengthening collectivism, increasing interactions between government and local communities and improving the provision of village‐level public goods. However, these effects do not extend to improvements in institutional quality. The findings of this paper shed important light on how traditional clan culture can be effectively integrated into modern governance institutions in China.
Qin et al. (2026) studied this question.