Political Efficacy, Trust And Resentment

This article analyzes the social stratum difference of grassroots political participation in urban China. Unlike existing domestic research, in this paper, political participation has been divided into three dimensions including voting for community election, involvement in public affairs and civil resistance. Based on the data of CGSS2010, we included political efficacy, trust and resentment in the framework of stratum analysis and use Binary Logistic regression models to testify the social stratum difference of grassroots political participation, and also to explore the different interpretation mechanisms.The research uses social economic status including personal income and education to measure social stratification. The results showed that voting for community election and involvement in public affairs shared social stratum differences, while civil resistance did not. Meanwhile, this article reveals three different interpretation mechanisms of grassroots political participation in urban China and clarifies the influences of political efficacy, trust and resentment.For voting in the community election, political efficacy and political trust have mediating effects toward the relation between social stratification and political participation. That is, people of high social stratum possess high political efficacy but with low voting rate; people of high social stratum have low level political trust therefore unwilling to vote.For involvement in public affairs, political efficacy and social trust function as mediating variables. The mechanism works in the way that people of high social stratum with high political efficacy are more likely to participate in the public affairs in the community. While people of high social stratum have lower level of social trust, then tend more actively involved in the public affairs to supervise the community.For civil resistance, political efficacy, political trust and resentment are direct interpretative variables. Specifically, high political efficacy encourages more resistance; low level of political trust in the government promotes more resistance; and most importantly, resentment hypothesis raised in this paper has been testified, that is, resentment is still an original source of civil resistance in the urban China.