饮食社交对政治信任的侵蚀及差异分析：关系资本的“副作用”

本文使用2009年中国八城市“社会网络与职业经历”(JSNET)问卷调查数据，探讨饮食社交对政治信任的影响。实证分析结果表明，城镇居民的社交聚餐频率对政治信任各维度均有负向效应，且这种侵蚀效应在不同体制、不同性别、不同学历和不同地区的人群间具有显著差别。本文的研究结果表明，以“饭局”为途径来积累、维系和动员关系资本的过程，在特定的情境下往往伴随社会层面的消极影响，对政治信任带来“副作用”。

Analyzing the Corrosive and Differential Roles of Social Eating in Political Trust:The Side Effects of Guanxi Capital

Using the data from the 2009 JSNET project, the present study explores the role of social eating on political trust among urban residents in eight Chinese cities. Based on a critical review of the existing literature, the authors of this article propose the hypothesis that social eating has corrosive effects on political trust, and identify social mechanisms through which guanxi capital exerts its role. Using the instrumental variable ordinal Probit model, we have confirmed the negative effects of social eating, and analyzed how these effects are differentiated between and among social groups defined by institution, gender, education, and region. We show that there are significant negative effects of social eating on different dimensions of political trust, and the effects are different across social groups. Findings in this paper reveal that the process of accumulating, maintaining and mobilizing guanxi capital via social eating among urban Chinese often comes with side effects at the society level. Unlike traditional social capital studies, we focus on negative roles of socializing to unpack the association between trust and guanxi capital. Although social eating is not the only way to generate and maintain guanxi capital among the Chinese, it is the most important channel under the Chinese context. Although the corrosive role of social eating in itself is not a proof for the direct effect of social capital on politics, it can be seen as a byproduct of the social capital process. That is, a certain type of social behavior can both increase social capital and impair political trust simultaneously.