Replication Data for: Popular financial reporting increases understanding, interest, and trust: experimental evidence

How can governments best report information to the public to enhance transparency and accountability? We address this question in the context of government financial reporting. Traditional financial reporting is widely considered technical and inaccessible to the public. In contrast, popular financial reporting is viewed as an accessible solution. As a result, we expect popular financial reporting to increase three outcomes relative to traditional financial reporting: recipients’ understanding, interest, and trust in government financial information. We conducted a pre-registered online survey experiment with Amazon Mechanical Turk using Cloud Research to compare subject responses to a Popular Annual Financial Report (a user-friendly format) and an Annual Comprehensive Financial Report (a traditional, technical format). The Popular Annual Financial Report causes an increase in understanding, interest, and trust in government financial information. The effects on interest and trust are larger for those who felt more informed about government budgets, voted for Donald Trump in 2020, and were more educated.

各国政府应如何最优地向公众发布信息，以提升治理透明度与公共问责性？本研究围绕政府财务报告场景探讨该问题。
传统财务报告普遍被认为技术性较强，普通公众难以理解。与之相对，通俗化财务报告被视作解决该问题的可行方案。据此，我们提出研究假设：相较于传统财务报告，通俗化财务报告可在三项指标上实现正向提升：受访者对政府财务信息的理解程度、关注意愿与信任水平。
我们依托云研究平台（Cloud Research），通过亚马逊土耳其机器人（Amazon Mechanical Turk）开展了预先注册的线上调查实验，对比受试者对通俗化年度财务报告（Popular Annual Financial Report，用户友好型格式）与综合年度财务报告（Annual Comprehensive Financial Report，传统技术性格式）的反馈。
实验结果表明，通俗化年度财务报告可提升受访者对政府财务信息的理解程度、关注意愿与信任水平。其中，对自身政府预算认知程度更高、2020年美国总统大选投票支持唐纳德·特朗普、受教育水平更高的群体，其在关注意愿与信任水平上受到的正向影响更为显著。