Research On The Impact Of Media Use On Rural Women's Political Participation

The mass media is an important way of political socialization.With the development of the economy and the progress of society,the mass media has gradually become an important tool for rural residents to obtain political information,understand political culture,and acquire political knowledge while entering people's daily life.It has not only changed the lifestyle of rural residents,but also subtly it has affected their attitudes and feelings about politics,and thus it has affected their political behavior.The media has important functions of political communication,political socialization,political participation and political supervision.As the wave of modernization sweeps across the countryside,will rural women's political participation benefit from media use? Do traditional media use and new media use have different effects on rural women's political participation? If there is an impact,what is the mechanism of this impact? Aiming at above problems,this paper bases on the Chinese General Social Survey 2013 data,focusing on rural women's political participation and based on Lasswell's 5W Model and Bandura's Social Learning Theory,the conceptual model of this paper is designed.Then,it builds a binary logit model for regression analysis,and explores the impact of different media use on rural women's political participation.Furthermore,it uses the Bootstrap method to explore multiple mediating mechanism that media use effects on rural women's political participation.The study founds that(1)the way of rural women's getting information is still dominated by traditional media,especially television.With the popularity of the Internet,the Internet has become the second largest medium after television;(2)the political participation of rural women is still at a low level.Rural women living in rural areas and having higher education level and older groups are more motivated to participate in political affairs;(3)the use of traditional media has a significant positiveimpact on the political participation of rural women,and the use of new media has a negative impact on the political participation of rural women;(4)the use of media can enhance rural women's gender awareness and improve the level of political cognition of them and reduce the relative deprivation of rural women.The use of traditional media has increased the political attention of rural women,and the use of new media has reduced the political attention of rural women;(5)gender awareness has a significant negative impact on the political participation of rural women.Higher political attention and lower relative deprivation can promote rural women's political participation;(6)gender awareness,political attention,and relative deprivation all have significant mediating effects between the use of traditional media,the use of new media,and political participation.Among them,gender awareness to some extent inhibits the positive impact of traditional media use on rural women's political participation,and relative deprivation to some extent inhibits the negative impact of new media use on rural women's political participation.This result means that rural women's political participation can be improved by improving rural information infrastructure,increasing media access for rural women and correctly guiding and giving full play to the positive role of the mass media.