| Since the birth of World Wide Web technology,the Internet has gradually penetrated all fields of daily life,which had produced wide and far-reaching social influences.As a response to this profound social change,a concept which called "Internet society" has gradually become well known.In many aspects of the development of Internet society,the changing trend of public engagement and public life was a common concerned topic for various disciplines of social science,such as sociology,political science,public management.With the rising of participatory democracy,consultative democracy and governance theory,public engagement which was regarded as an important means of releasing social vitality and promoting public well-being,was being paid more and more attention by more and more countries and societies.In the new governance pattern of China which highlighted co-governance,co-construction and sharing,stimulating the enthusiasm of the public to participate in the governance of public affairs actively and orderly had been regarded as an important support for improving the modern national governance system and enhancing social governance capabilities.However,the actual development trend of public engagement was very pessimistic,or even presented a huge contrast.Not only many theorists held a negative attitude towards contemporary public lives,but also a large number of empirical studies around the world had observed that the statistics of public engagement were showing a marked downward trend in many aspects.How to arouse the public awareness and participation enthusiasm of social populace,especially the younger generation,had become a common concern issue of governments,social media and academia.In this context,the Internet which grown up with young people,had been placed on the expectation of reversing the decline of public lives.However,academia had not yet reached a consensus on the relationship between Internet and public engagement.In the 1990 s,scholars were divided into two groups.One side who took a positive stand was labeled “Utopian”,the other who took opposite position was labeled “anti-Utopian”.In the 2000 s,the problem was further complicated by the increasing number of empirical studies,a serious of new viewpoints appeared one after another,such as strengthening effect,mobilization effect,different usage effect,statistical uncorrelation,indirect effect and activation effect.Around above controversy,this paper was based on the data of Chinese Social Survey 2015(CSS2015),analyzed the relationships between public engagement and online participations which was a general type of Internet usage,to make a supplementary answer to above issue based on the Chinese experiences.According to the previous classification framework,this paper divided public engagement into four basic types: expression participation,protest participation,election participation and commonweal participation.In addition,the above-mentioned types of public engagement were also divided into two analytical dimensions: participation behaviors and participation attitudes.In other words,this paper would examine the impacts of online participation on different participative behaviors and attitudes.This paper used three methods to analyses date,including logic regression(logit),Instrumental variables(IVprobit)and propensity score matching(PSM).In the statistical models,dependent variables were four types of public participation behavior and participative attitude,independent variable was online participation behavior,controlled variables involved five aspects: demographic characteristics,participation resources,participation consciousness,social awareness and online social intercourse behavior.The Logit models found that there were significant differences between online participants and non-online participants in the probability of expression participation behavior,expression participation attitude,election participation attitude,commonweal participation behavior and commonweal participation attitude.The IVprobit models found that,after adding the instrumental variable of ICT products preference,online participation still had significant positive relationships with expression participation behavior,expression participation attitude,election participation attitude,commonweal participation behavior and commonweal participation attitude.As for the election participation model,the endogenous problem of explanatory variable was not found.The PSM models found that,in the above five models,the average treatment effect on the treatment(ATT)were all positive,and all of them reached the significance requirement of 5% statistical level.Latter two methods consistently indicated that there were statistically positive causal relationships between online participation and the above two types of participation behavior and the three types of participation attitude.In addition,the study also showed that there were not statistically significant relationships between online participation and the other types of public engagement,including election participation attitude,protest participation behavior and protest participation attitude.Based on the statistical results,this paper draws the following conclusions.Firstly,online participation had both explicit strengthening effect and potential mobilization effect to expression participation and commonweal participation.Secondly,online participation only had potential mobilization effect to election participation.Thirdly,in the aspect of protest participation,online participation maybe had a potential instrumental value,but it could not have substantive impacts on public participation behavior and attitude.By combining the past viewpoints with the research findings on the relationships between Internet use and public engagement,five main conclusions were obtained in this paper.Firstly,online activities could indeed have a direct impact on offline public lives,which refuted the view of statistical uncorrelation and complemented the view of indirect effect.Secondly,there were significant causal relationships between the Internet use and public engagement in statistics.In other words,the use of the Internet as a cause would lead to a change in the outcome of public participation.Thirdly,due to the group social characteristics,the usage of Internet and the types of public activities,the effects of the Internet on public engagement would vary to a certain extent.These varieties were mainly manifested in three aspects: 1)The different ways to use Internet would indeed lead to different effects on public engagement,which supported the view of different usage effect.2)The effects of the Internet use on public engagement would vary with the types of public activities.3)The effects of the Internet use on public engagement would be vary with the difference of group social characteristics.Fourthly,based on the sample data of CSS2015,this paper did not find strong evidences to support the view of negative effect.Fifthly,the positive impacts of Internet use were mainly reflected in the strengthening effect,but with appropriate external conditions,it also could become an effective mobilization force.In addition,this paper finally focused on the basic premise of the positive impacts of online participation,which emphasized that the digital public sphere should be in a positive and orderly state,and discussed the potential threats and challenges of digital public sphere in three dimensions of structure,representativeness and interaction. |
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