Study On Citizen Participation From The Perspective Of Social Capital In Urban Community Governance

As the actual and symbolic carrier of a nation’s economic, political, social and cultural center, city, represents the degree of the country’s national level and development. While the community is the smallest unit of organizational management in the city, it takes the actual responsibility of urban governance. With the city continues to develop, the status of the community is also increasing, and the importance, as well as the effectiveness, of governance also improves. At present, many researches have shown that citizens’ participation in community is restricted and influenced by many factors. One important factor, however, is the community social capital size. Social capital is divided into several dimensions, including the network participation, norms of reciprocity, social trust and emotional identification.Starting from different dimensions of social capital, this thesis discusses the relationship between each factor and citizen participation in urban community governance, in order to put more useful suggestions on how to improve citizen participation in urban community governance and on effectively improving social capital in urban community. Therefore, this thesis helps to move forward towards solving the ever-present problem that current urban community is lack of citizen participation.Through previous systematic literature reading and text analysis, this thesis takes Chongqing urban community as the example. By selecting questionnaire survey method, this thesis detailed analyzes the status of urban community social capital and citizen participation. To further study on the relationship between those two, this thesis uses empirical analysis on the collected data, aiming to solve the plight of citizen participation, which results from the lack of social capital in urban community. This thesis has found that, 1) there is a significant positive correlation between urban community social capital and the citizen participation; 2) different dimensions of social capital have different positive effects on the behavior of citizen participation; 3) various demographic variables have different degree and direction to the citizen participation behavior. Finally, this thesis puts forward four countermeasures and suggestions to further improve citizens’ participation in urban community governance.