A Study On The Effect Of Village Social Capital On Rural Residents' Participation In Village Committee Elections

The quality of rural residents' political participation always reflects a country's social democracy degree. With the development of new countryside construction and the implementation of grass-root democracy in countryside, the depth and breadth of Chinese farmers' political participation gets a big breakthrough. However, there is still a big distance between it and requirements of the modern democracy system, and it even restricts rural economic development.As a new theory tool to explain the society, social capital can provide a new interpretation paradigm for rural residents'political participation. The development and function of social capital theory can help us further know and comprehend the special theoretical value of the change of trust, norms and relation network to the construction of the grass-root democracy. According to social capital theory, new types of social capital can promote the development of rural residents'autonomy, and further establish the structure and pattern of rural residents'governance at a new level.The current study, which took place in a county of Dongying city, Shandong Province, showed us an important factor in village committee election—social capital, from a new perspective, through lots of data and detailed cases within the social capital system theory framework. It further revealed the influence of many factors of social capital on village committee elections in China through empirical studies. Simply speaking, the purposes of the current study aim to (1) highlight social capital problems in current rural areas through rural residents'participation in village committee elections with social transformation as the background; (2) analyze the operation logic and influence of social capital on village committee elections; (3) point out that the influence is not accidental or instantaneous but its existence is inevitable and continued.The study is composed of five chapters. The first part is the introduction, which expounds the research background and significance of the current study, reviews related studies on social capital both home and abroad, introduces the research methods and research design.Chapter two is about the measurement of rural social capital. On the basis of the definition of social capital of scholars in and out of China, together with China's social reality, the current study defined social capital in a new way to make it clearer. Then the study further divided social capital amount into eight dimensions and designed detailed measurement index. The data of questionnaires were entered into SPSS for statistical analysis. Six social capital factors were chosen, namely, community identity, community trust, community interaction, community mutual support, community standards, and trust of village leaders.Chapter three, measurement of village committee elections participation, chose four factors of village committee elections participation with the help of SPSS:expression, election, preliminary election, and abstention.In Chapter four, four linear models between the six factors of social capital and four factors of village committee elections participation were got through correlation analysis and linear regression analysis. The four models reflected the influence of the six factors of social capital on village committee elections participation. Why these influences happened and how these influences were functioning were further analysized.Based on the above four chapters, Chapter five conducted further thinking on: why could social capital influence village committee elections participation? Will the influence be more effective or weaker? How should we lead construction of new types of social capital?Chapter six, the summary of this study, showed the limitations and insufficiency of the current study.