The Influence Of Trust On The Online Civic Participation Behavior

In the era of web2.0, many of the acts of the netizens are marked with the stigma of civic participation. Their attention expression,discussion and mobilization of public issues have deeply affected our public life,and changed the relationship between nations and citizens. The online civic participation has become an increasingly important online social behavior, which also deeply affect our real life.So it’s also a crucial issue that can’t be ignored in the research of Cybersociety. The basic structure and the logic of the online civic participation behavior still need to be lucubrated. This research will use scale to measure the online civic participation behavior and the trust social capital of netizens, and investigate the impact of the trust on the online civic participation behavior from the perspective of social capital.We found that there are three types of online civic participation behavior of college students, which include the behavior of action participation, the behavior of expression and discussion, and the behavior of information access. The factor scores of the three types of behaviors indicate that the participation is not in a high level.The behavior of action participation degree is high but the behavior of expression and discussion, and the behavior of information access degree is relatively low.There are two aspects of social capital of trust, which is interpersonal trust and political trust, to be specific, they are reality trust, internet trust and political trust. From the influence factors of the online civic participation behavior we found, gender is an important variable that influence the online civic participation behavior, The ethnic group of the college students has significant effect on the behavior of action participation, and the behavior of expression and discussion was influenced by the ownership of personal computer. The behavior of the information access was effected by the politics status and the major of the college students. Three variables of Internet use degree——nets age, online frequency and online time have no influence on the online civic participation behavior. Based on the social capital perspective, The three kinds of trust capital have significant impact on the action participation behavior. To be specific, internet trust and political trust have positive effect, but reality trust have negative effect.Internet trust has positive effect on the behavior of expression and discussion. For information access behavior, only political trust have significant effect.Above all, Internet trust and political trust play important roles in online civic participation behavior. The internet trust capital constructed by cyberspace, which is an important part of social capital, and the source of promoting the civic participation and building the civil society.