A Study Of The Peasant's Democratic Ability In Contemporary China--An Empirical Analysis Based On Shiqiao Town, Henan Province

The ultimate goal of village self-governance is to achieve effective governance of rural community.However,it is not easy for farmers to learn from modern democracy because of the constraints of social conditions in rural areas.For example,farmers may inevitably encounter a series of problems in political participation and political practice,leading to the current social situation that villagers' self-governance has rested more on the level of the formal rule of governance than the effective governance itself.Since China has entered the new era,the pace of Chinese democracy development process under the leadership of the state is still slow.By observing its development history,we can see that the researches on democracy ability of peasants are always ignored in the longest and most influential practice of democracy in rural areas of China.And farmers have long been labeled as low cultural quality and lack of democracy.Therefore,this thesis mainly focuses on the democracy construction of people to study the democracy capability of contemporary Chinese peasants.Firstly,on the basis of summarizing and reviewing previous studies,combining the actual situation of the vast rural areas,this paper will divide the democracy capability of peasants into the democratic expression capability of farmers,the democratic cooperation capability of farmers and the democratic supervision capability,and build a theoretical model to explore the factors which influence the peasants' democracy capability;Secondly,this thesis,takes Shiqiao Town of Nanyang City,Henan Province in the central part of China as a case,obtains research data with field research and then sorts out these statistics with SPSS software;Finally,it analyzes the characteristics of contemporary farmers' democratic expression capability,democratic cooperation capability,and democratic supervision capability,and explores its specific influence on the democratic power of the peasants based on demographic variables,political socialization variables,concepts of democracy,traditional concepts,political efficacy,political participation etc..And then it deepens the research on the peasants' democracy capability and finds out an effective way to cultivate democracy capability.The main conclusions of this article as follows:Firstly,the construction of democratic system and democracy capability is inseparable in the process of building grass-roots democracy in our country.The democratic system has designed a set of mechanism of rights checks and balances that provide institutional guarantees for democratic political participation.Furthermore,the enhancement of democracy capability has also boosted the enthusiasm of citizens to participate in politics.Only by achieving a positive interaction between democracy capability and democratic systems can we consolidate and improve democratic system.If the institutional innovation is to be internalized as a part of the villagers' lives and becomes their daily habits and way of life,the cultivation of the democracy capability of farmers is the key factor.Secondly,interest is the starting point for people to form political relations.The traditional small peasant ideology leads to the villagers to take a better attitude to deal with the problems or to take a different form of feedback to the superior government.It is urgent to master a more effective democratic expression technique so that the farmers can make their own internal political demands within the democratic order and transform into external realistic interests.In terms of influence factors of the democratic expression of peasants,their democratic expression capability is significantly positively related to gender,political status,economic level,democratic awareness,political efficacy,democratic participation,interest identification ability and maintenance ability.However,it is significantly negatively related to traditional concepts;factors such as age,ethnicity,educational background,occupation,and democratic attitude have little influence on democratic expression capability of peasants.Thirdly,the peasants,who have experienced the traditional decentralization,to the administrative cooperation,to the market indulgence,and to the policy cultivation,are now no longer with a strong sense of cooperation,but to self-interest independent individuals.Through the continuous infiltration of market economy,the orientation of self-interest behavior of farmers is more obvious.People only wish to achieve their own benefits through participation,instead of maximizing their own interests through cooperation on the basis of realizing public interests.In terms of the influence factors of farmers' democratic cooperation capability,the farmers' democratic cooperation ability is positively correlated with gender,political status,economic level,political efficacy,democratic participation,cooperation and organization awareness,community consciousness,and leadership ability of village cadres.However,it is significantly negatively related to traditional concepts.Factors such as age,ethnicity,educational background,occupation,and concept of democracy have little influence on the democratic supervision capability of farmers.Fourthly,the reasons for the poor operation of democratic supervision at the village level in China are the result of the lack of the external supervision mechanism and the lack of the democratic supervision ability of the inner peasants.Because the main body of the supervision is often the masses of the peasants,the people who are supervised are also the villagers in the village,and in the "acquaintance" society inside the village,the actual supervision effect is not ideal.In terms of the influence factors of farmers' democracy supervision capability,the democracy supervision capability of farmers has a significant positive correlation with gender,political status,degree of education,concepts of democracy,democratic participation,political efficacy,supervision cognition and supervision awareness.It has a significant negative correlation with traditional concepts.Factors such as age,nationality,economic level and occupation have little impact on the democracy supervision ability of farmers.In brief,the problems about the democracy capability of peasants in the process of promotion of democracy at the grass-roots level in China cannot be directly ascribed to a specific factor,but the result of a combination of various environmental aspects and other factors.Therefore,the improvement of the democracy capability of peasants cannot only rely on one aspect of efforts.It requires comprehensive governance.To achieve the improvement of democracy capability from the perspective of the overall development of democratic politics,there are several ways: first,it should realize the transition from the study of democratic object to the study of democratic subjects;second,it should realize the transition from a democratic system to a democratic cultural atmosphere;third,it should achieve the transition from the state's promotion to the "upper and lower linkage" grassroots governance model.