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Abstract Political trust indicates a fundamental orientation toward the government， reflecting the degree of citizen's support for government. It not only has a deep impact on the cost of public policy implementation but also is of great importance to the political stabilization. Many scholars have argued that within the Chinese society， the central government receives high degrees of trust whereas the local governments get low degrees of trust from the public. Not only does this situation cause dilemmas for the local governments， but it also affects the stability of the entire political system. Previous studies have shown that cultural psychology and the institutional performance are considered as two important sources of citizen's political trust. But how do these factors affect the hierarchical political trust in China？ And which kind of mechanism leads to a strong-center and weak-local political trust structure？ These questions still remain unclear. To bridge these research gaps， based on large statistical data—the second wave of China volume Asian Barometer Survey， a moderated multiple linear regression model is established. Through empirical analysis， this article explores the various impacts of cultural psychology and institutional performance on the central political trust， local political trust， and trust gaps， respectively. Moreover， this article examines the interactional effects between cultural psychology and institutional performance. This article strongly supports the result that institutional performance and cultural psychology are the main sources of political trust. Empirical results show that the authoritarian values， economic performance， and government response have positive effects on the central as well as local political trust significantly. Besides， the authoritarian values and government responses are proved to have negative effects on the trust gap between central government and local governments. This result suggests that the authoritarian values and government responses are two main sources of hierarchical trust， further extending the understanding of the origin of hierarchical trust in China. Further studies find that the interaction of authoritarian values and economic performances has a significantly negative effect on central government trust while the interaction of authoritarian values and government responses has a significantly negative effect on local government trust. In particular， the results also reveal that there exists a significantly negative effect of the interaction terms of authoritarian values and economic performances on the trust gap between central government and local governments. This result demonstrates that authoritarian values will play a better role in the case of high economic performances. This finding advances the understanding of the hierarchical trust in the government from the perspective of interactional mechanism．
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