Construction Of Autonomy Organizations And Villagers ' Autonomy Choice

Resorting to the Villager Committee is still the most central way for villagers to participating in the rural governance. Because the Committee is the most primary level of rural governance, it may be overworked for dealing with too much administration practices. It must perform its duty assigned by National Laws while accomplishing a number of political tasks from higher levels. Thus, the reliance on Villagers Committee is not an efficient way for rural governance.This study focused on how to reduce the administrative burden of the Villager Committee by providing more ways for governance participation. Based on rational choice institutionalism perspective, we introduced the concept of transaction costs and analyzed that whether the establishment of the Villagers' Group and Rural Board are virtual ways for reducing such burden and the villagers' dependency on the Committee. We separated this dependency by introducing two sub-dimensions as dependent variables: the tendency and the behavior of choosing the Villager's Committee as rural governance participating method. Based on the questionnaire data collected from the villagers of Qingyuan, we developed the Logit and Probit models to estimate the effects of establishing the Group and the Board to the dependent variables. Our result shows that there exists a substitute effect from these two organizations, which could significantly reduce the tendency and behavior of choosing the Committee and are able to reduce the villagers' reliance on it.Our empirical models highlighted six suggestions for rural governance. First, the government and the Committee should rationally mobilize the strengths of local organizations to reduce the burden of them, and enhance the efficient of rural governance. Second, establishing more rural organizations could reduce the transactions costs of the villagers for exercising their autonomy. Third, optimizing the administration functions could ensure the Committee focusing on critical businesses in the rural governance. Four, providing supports such as institution, public goods, economics and human resource management could be beneficial for rural governance.