The Study On Phenomenon Of Villagers’ Political Apathy In Village Committee Election

Democratic election is the central part of villagers’ autonomy, it is the directembodiment that villagers express their own interests and exercise their democraticrights. However, in the village election, villagers as the most important but largelyinvolved participants, some of them performance a kind of political apathy tendency,they always give up the right to vote voluntarily, evade the election, go with the flow,ignore the election results and so on. These behaviors severely affect the normalconduct of village committee election, and hinder the development process of ruralgrass-roots democracy.The apathetic tendency to politic that villagers show in the village committeeelection, results from various factors influencing each other. Whereas, thecontradiction between the designed purpose and the practical operation of the villagecommittee electoral system, is the fundamental reasons of villagers’ political apathy.This paper based on the macro data that collected from various network resources,publications and researches, which are concerned with villagers’ performance ofpolitical apathy in the village election, and also selected Banqiao village as the objectto do some surveys and interviews, after analyzing these questionnaires we got thedirect data that can be used to understand the real attitude of the villagers of villageelection. On the basis of this, by peeling some external factors that affect villagers’participation in the election, from the new institutionalism perspective to analyze whythe famers shown political apathy in the village committee election, from the side ofrational institutionalism, historical institutionalism and sociological institutionalism.The results tell us that people who are living in the system, their choices will beaffected by the system deeply. Villagers as rational human, they always make rationalchoices, and as institutional actors, they will make other choices, both of them arecarried out within the framework of the system. Political apathy is the mostreasonable choice of villagers in the current institutional framework; due to theeffects of path dependence, villagers are accustomed to the political apathy; and asinstitutional actors their behavior also affected by other actors’ behavior, from thispolitical apathy is the most normal choice. In order to eliminate the political apathy ofvillagers in the village election, from the perspective of the institutionalism, we needto establishing a system of incentives to guide villagers’ direction of rational choice, shaping and strengthening the propaganda and ideological system, w eakening theimpact of path dependence, improve the electoral system, so that politicalparticipation may turn to be the most appropriate choice.