Political Space Of The Elderly In Urban Community Governance

With the modernization of national governance system and the aged tendency of population, the elderly is playing an increasingly important role in city community governance. Based on this problem consciousness, this paper introduced the concept of "political space" as an framework to analysis the elderly in urban community governance. Including structural position,function, and the interaction with other community governance movers and macro political system. Aspired by the Field Theory, it also means to place it in a larger vision, in the interaction of power, the movers and the field, so as to observe the elderly in a stereo eyesight. It means not only revealing the "surface" (the reality form of political space), but also analysis the "inside" (impacting factors and operation logic of political space). Through the method of combining quantitative research with qualitative research, and observations based on Xin Hua community as well as 177 valid samples. The empirical analysis of the political space of the elderly includes three parts, reality form, impacting factor and operation logic.Since Plato and Aristotle’s theory tradition, power is the primary focus of political theory. From the triple perspective of the community power structure, the interaction between subject and power operation mechanism,on one side, the permeability of the state power impacts on the grassroots, on the other hand, the elderly have great interest to participate in community governance so as to express their group interests and realize their own value. As a result, a kind of "soft" approach works between the state power and the elderly, reaching a subtle balance of the power interaction. Under the shape of the the power relations, the political space of the elderly in the urban community governance can be represented by two categories of mobilized political space and autonomy political space, and can be affected by three sorts of factors, the elderly individual factor (gender, health status, income level, professional experience), communication factor (community public entertainment, contacts, interests reliance) and ideology factor(community sense of belonging, personal identity, political self-efficacy). From the perspective of the operation logic of the elderly political space, a strong demand of organization’s sense of belonging and connected to the interests of the community is the main reason that drive the elderly to participate in community governance, as well as the axis of elderly political space of "old elite" (volunteers backbone etc.) The operation and investment of "human relationships" is the key drive power and operation logic of the elderly political space.