Research On Influential Factors For Youths’ Online Political Participation

With the development of Internet around the world, Internet, which is known as the "fourth media" has been widely used in every field of real society, especially politics, since the1990s. As a result, network brought the new form of political participation—online political participation. By the end of June,2011, the total amount of Chinese netizens had reached4.85billion, and Internet penetration rate was36.2percent,51percent of Chinese netizens are30to39years old. Then youths has become the primary users of network, it follows that youths online political participation of youths developed with an irresistible force. But the research studied on online political participation which focused on perceptual cognition, lack of a scientific, scrupulous and depth intellection. So it requires us to understand the status of young people’s online political participation from a rational point of view, it has a profound and far reaching significance for promoting scientific progress, guiding correct understanding,and establishing healthy network participation platform. On the basis of theory of planned behavior, the paper intends to further investigate factors of young people’s online political participation.The research framework and assumptions was built up on the basis of planned behavior theory, and this study focused on the factors of attitudes towards the behavior and subjective norm impacting youths whether to take part in online political participation. The author chose the investigation as research methodologies, quota sampling as a method to determine samples, and questionnaire as the way of data collection. On the basis of preliminary evaluation of sample and questionnaire, then the author used the method of logistic regression to analyze data of580questionnaires, and arrived at the following conclusion. Firstly, in the subjective norm aspect, subjective norm from groups which were closely linked had a strong influence on the behavior of different levels, and subjective norm from groups which weren’t direct contact affected the deep levels of online political participation. Attitudes mostly affected online political participation which was on low levels, including recognition and emotion. Accordingly, some policy proposals and the direction of the latter research were given from the perspective of social work.