Political Participation Under The Influence Of Popular Culture

Abstract:The youth are one of essential groups in political participation.In China,there are many questions about the ability,willingness,norms and results of young people's political participation.The popular culture is often viewed as the cause of those questions,because the youth are the crucial performers in popular culture.Entertainment may erode the willingness and weaken the ability of political participation.January 16,2016,"Di Ba goes to battle" was the political participation mainly organised by young people.Throughout the event the youth exerted their ability to use polular culture to engage in the politics.The influence is the influence made by popular culture on political participation.The main question of this paper is to analyse the mechanism of the influence and figure out the reason why young people chose popular culture to participate the political participation."Bao Ba" is the collective action by funs in Baidu Tieba to spam some specfic post bar.There are four similarities between "Bao Ba" and "Di Ba goes to battle".The four similarities made the influence on two events similar.Thus,the mothod of this research is to apply the way to analyse the influence of popular culture on "Bao Ba" to the influence of popular culture on "Di Ba goes to battle".In "Bao Ba",the way of organisation and expression provided by the popular culture has become the habit of funs;on mental motivation,positive and negative motivation by popular,frequently provoked the "Bao Ba".In "Di Ba goes to battle",popular culture also provided young people with the way of organisation and expression and the mental motivation.Young people were strongly stimulated by nationalism in such short time so that they applied the habitual way to express their feelings and to organise their participation.From the case of "Di Ba goes to battle",the group of young funs had shown its organizational capability and the spirit of solidarity and cooperation,which endowed them the ability to civic engagement.On the other side,"Di Ba goes to battle" also had lots of irrational contents,which were rooted in irrational nationalism and expression way of popular culture.It alerts that the public order may always under the threat of collapse when young people use the popular culture to express political points that are filled with irrational elements.Meanwhile,the political expression under the popular culture may mingle the entertainment-oriented personal feelings with serious political content,and finally,erode the meanings of public course.Any groups engaging on political participation will have familar culture.The method to compare daily popular culture practices of young people and their political participation,inspires us a new way to analyse the influence of culture on political participation.The virtuous and noxious influence of popular culture on political participation revealed in this research,offers the instructional ideas about the way to construct a benigh public discourse and mature norm of democracy.