Media Use And Political Participation Of Rural Residents

The political participation of rural residents is an important indicator of a country's political level,which can affect the political civilization and social harmony to some extent.Some studies have pointed out that logical connection between political participation and political identity exists,because political participation is an explicit political behavior,while political identity is an implicit political attitude.The identity of citizens in political systems,leaders,etc.can expand political participation in an orderly manner.Political identity is a sense of belonging,which is largely a subjective tendency generated by the identity subject.It is extremely complicated and difficult to integrate the subjective tendencies of different identity subjects,but in this process,the media can play the role of “making consensus”.This paper adopts ethnographic method and selects three villages in Chengdu as survey sites.After in-depth interviews with 30 villagers,this paper has found that there are three characteristics in the institutionalized political participation of rural residents: enthusiastic,indifferent and intermediate type.The factors in making such differences are multifaceted and political identity plays an important role in it.The enthusiastic type is mostly comprised of elderly people and party members in villages.Their level of political identity has reached the middle or high level.This is an ideal state.The indifferent villagers are mostly migrant workers who always drift between rural areas and cities.The political alienation caused by the amphibious state has forced them to produce indifferent political identity and some villagers have developed indifference because of their dissatisfaction with the electoral system.The intermediate type is a complicated group.Their participation in political affairs is in an intermediate state and the reasons behind it are multi-faceted.Rural culture plays a part in it or they are driven by interests,thus producing pseudo identity.In addition,differential political identity exists in rural residents,which is a kind of differential identity between central and local government.To some extent,the political identity of rural residents can explain their institutionalized political participation.How can media play an important role in influencing and changing the political identity,which is an important part of their institutionalized political participation,will also be explained in this paper.In rural areas,there are three different trends in non-institutionalized political participation: first,the use of interpersonal relationship has become an important means for rural residents to solve problems;second,the media has made rural residents become more rationalized in non-institutionalized political participation;third,“opinion leaders” in rural areas guide residents' non-institutionalized political participation in a reasonable manner.