Constituents and Practical Impacts on Civic Engagement of Associations in Contemporary China

Abstract

The analysis in this paper reveals that on the individual level, the institutional framework continues to exert a profound impact on social organizations’ forms and civic engagement in China. The CGSS2012-based analysis leads to the following findings. For a start, political party members and danwei employees demonstrate a higher degree of social organizational involvement and civic engagement. In the meanwhile, the party members’ role in promoting civic engagement is achieved to some extent through mediating effect of social organizations. Next, various types of social organizations have significantly increased civic engagement on a practical level. Finally, income plays a large role to increase the individuals’ organizational involvement, albeit with no obvious influence on civic engagement in practice. These findings are significant in the following ways. First, from an empirical perspective, the current institutional design for social organizations to participate in social governance has delivered the expected results. Second, it confirmed the existence of activists with distinct features in social life as well as the integration of multiple governing networks in social space at grassroots level. Third, in theory, this paper noted that apart from institutional environment of technical governance by bureaucratic government, institutional framework constitutes an important institutional foundation for the development of social organizations, giving rise to the need of further discussions about the interaction mechanism between political parties and society.