| With the deepening of social reforms and transformation, destabilizing factors and uncertainties are continually growing in China. Mass incidents, rooted in conflict of interests, accumulation of contradictions, unfair distribution, and poor enforcement of law, are of increasingly frequent occurrence. A review of the mass incidents occurred in the past decade reveals an important tendency of evolvement, which can be concluded as enlargement in scale, intensification in mass behavior, as well as diversification in inherent characteristic. Therefore, this thesis aims to analyze the potential affecting factors shaping the arising and escalation of mass incidents in order to come to effective solutions to its accompanying conflicts and contradictions.Based on the theory of collective action, the thesis adopts both case study and quantitative analysis, and seeks to, by selecting potential factors and conducting correlation analysis, identify correlative factors in shaping mass incidents and propose its corresponding strategies of governing. Specifically, when analyzing the arising and escalation of mass incident, the outcome variable is defined as "the intensity of incident"; and the explanatory variables are defined as "environment variable", "mobilization variable", and "attribute variable". Then, through a textual analysis of 60 cases, the thesis assigns every individual variable and tests the correlation between three explanatory variables and the outcome variable respectively, by using SPSS for statistical analysis.Correlation test results show that,1) political variable affects the arising of collective behavior; 2) the factors that have significant impacts on the escalation of collective behavior are the variables concerned with economy, culture, organization, dissemination, actors, and psychology; and 3) the duration and scale of incidents have significant impacts on the resolving and alleviating of collective behavior.In conclusion, this thesis puts forward several suggestions for managing mass incidents. First and foremost, the social environment system needs to be improved and consolidated, including improvements in economic performance, education attainment, administrative capacity, social security mechanism as well as disputes mediation mechanism. Second, the process of mobilization can be prevented by information disclosure and communication, policy-making based on deliberative dialogue, and inducing the third party. Third, in regard to duration and scale of incidents, it is recommended that response should be made as soon as possible, and solutions should be tailored to different actors and their appeals. Finally, a mechanism for social stability assessment should be established, to detect destabilizing factors and uncertainties and prevent them to trigger or escalate collective behavior. |
