The Empirical Research Of Chinese Countryside Voting Behavior And Its Relationship With Electorate's Personality Characteristics

Political democratization includes institutional democratization and people's democratization. From the perspective of political psychology, People's democratization is of great significance, which is showed in political participation behavior and voting behavior. In the West, the research on psychology of voting behavior has a history of over sixty years which can be seen as three stages: the early stage emphasized the relationship between electorate psychology and voting behavior; after the 1970s researchers shifted their attention to the effect of politician's personality on his political decision and leading styles; recent research focuses on exploring how candidate's psychological characteristics influence electorate's voting tendency, where an inclination to put political leader and voter into consideration emerges. In Chinese Mainland, studies of voting behavior are mostly done by sociologist and politician, who concentrate their mind on countryside election because in China election democratization process began in the countryside where direct election of villager committee were first executed. Current studies emphasize the execution of countryside voting system, its effect on political and economic development in the countryside and voting participation of countryside electorate. The studies examining voting behavior of countryside electorate mostly employ percent statistical study of the data obtained from questionnaire; little is done from the perspective of psychology.On the basis of psychological principle and technique, this paper consists of three studies aimed at exploring countryside voting behavior and its relationship with voter's personality. Study one developed Chinese Countryside Voting Behavioral Questionnaire; Study two and three employed multi-statistical technique such as correlation analysis, cluster analysis and variance analysis to examine the effects of countryside electorate's demology characteristic and personalities on their voting behavior, the results were listed as follows:1.Countryside electorate voting behavior included political voting orientation and non-political voting orientation, of which political voting orientation consisted of four factors, they were policy effect, people's livelihood awareness, villager's rights and interests, and supervising mechanism; non-political voting orientation consisted of seven factors, they were candidate's identity, candidate's virtue, electorate's social relationship, candidate's background, electorate's self-interest, electorate's self-right and party's political opinion. Developed on the basis of this structure, Chinese Countryside Voting Behavioral Questionnaire with eleven subscales was of proper homogeneity reliability, item discrimination and construct validity. It could serve as the quantitative assessment of countryside electorate's voting attitude and tendency.2. Electorate's demology characteristics correlated with their voting behavior weakly, that is, different voters with different demology characteristics displayed little difference in theirvoting behavior. In the three variables from the inner (sex, age and nation), the factor of sex influenced voting behavior weakly; voters over forty years old valued the voting behavior's effect on defending villager's rights and interests; the Han electorate valued its effect on the implementation of national policy; the voting behavior of electorate from ethnic groups tends to be affected by the factors concerning candidate's identity, candidate's background and party's political opinion. In the three variables from the outside, such factors as political affiliation, educational level and economical income were not found to influence voting behavior significantly.3. Electorate's personalities were found to correlate with their voting behavior broadly and significantly, that is, electorate with different personality types were inclined to have different understanding of countryside voting system, thus they were different in voting tendency. Electorate with positive p...