In the paper "How Do Language Attitudes Affect Political Trust?," Yue Hu explores the authority-marker theory of language attitudes in multilingual countries. The authority-marker theory posits that listeners have more trust in bureaucrats who speak the official language than bureaucrats who speak a dialect, even if those listeners do not speak the same dialect as the bureaucrat. Hu explains that the authority-marker theory contrasts the culture-marker theory, which posits that listeners favor representatives who share their local dialect.

Hu begins by discussing language's role in political communication between a government and its citizens, with a focus on its role in establishing trust. After providing an overview of relevant literature on the topic, he begins to discuss his study in China, in which he adjusted the matched guise method with a double-blind design that allowed for the identification of attitude variance. He used 421 high school students from two separate schools as subjects and ensured they represented different dialect zones. His experiments found that

listeners hold significantly more trust in the bureaucrats who speak an official language that in those who speak the local vernacular, even if the speakers and listens share this same native dialect.

This finding has significant implications for studies of language attitudes, as it suggests that the authority-marker effect is much stronger than the culture-marker effect and highlights the tremendous impact that language has on people's lives.