This study explores how the application of democratic rule in land reform decision-making determines villagers’ political trust towards different levels of the government in China. Based on analyses of a two-period household survey data we find that in China’s most recent Collective Forest Tenure Reform, the use of democratic rule improves villagers’ trust for town and county cadres, whereas the impact on trust towards village cadres is only significant for the democracy involving all the villagers or households in a village. This pattern of trust is partly explained by our findings that the democratic process helped decrease the unresolved inter-village forestland disputes whilst there seems no such impact on the within-village land disputes. Heterogeneity analyses show that democratic decision-making has a more pronounced effect in improving trust for villagers with lower income, and those without affiliation with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) or to the village committee.

The side effect of automation on the economy has been discussed frequently, but little is known regarding its political consequences. This paper examines the causal effect that automation induces political costs for the local government. By combining the national individual-level panel data of political trust with the prefecture-level robot exposure rate in China biennially during the period 2012– 2018, we find that the development of automation would incur lower political trust in the Chinese local government. Furthermore, the impact may result from the risk of unemployment, intensified pessimism about local government, higher downside risk, and declining group participation, providing a few channels for the automation process to affect citizens’political trust. This paper provides empirical evidence for the impact of automation and the source of political legitimacy, contributing to the literature about automation by emphasizing the crucial role of government in coping with the technological progress and making good use of endogenous creative destruction.