公共品供给满意度对村民选举参与行为的影响研究——基于“退出-呼吁”理论的新视角

公共品供给不仅与村民收入及农村经济发展息息相关，也与农村基层治理水平有着密切关系。对中国“十县百村”1 981位村民的调查分析表明：（1）村民会出于对村级公共品的需求而参与选举，反之，退出的概率就会显著增加；（2）不同村民对村集体提供的公共品存在不同的潜在需求，因此也会采取不同的选举行为以表达自己的利益诉求；（3）个人收入来源、受教育水平、村庄规模对村民参与选举的行为有显著影响，但不同组别之间的影响有所不同。

The Impact of Villagers'Satisfaction with Public Goods Provision on Their Behavior in Grass-root Elections: A New Perspective of the Exit-Voice Theory

The provision of public goods in rural areas, which is a typical collective action of villagers, not only impacts farm households’ income but is also closely related to the rural governance structure. Maintaining and encouraging villagers’ participation in village elections and public affairs are very important to rural economic development and to the healthy growth of the village autonomy system as well. Since the implementation of the election system of villagers’ committee in China, a number of studies have been conducted with regard to the relationship between rural elections and public goods provision, and some of them have examined the determinants of villagers’ participation in this system. However, most existing studies have failed to distinguish between different electoral behaviors of villagers during the complex election process; neither have they made compelling arguments for the dynamic mechanism of villagers’ diverse motivations for voting behaviors. Besides, still fewer studies conducted large-scale field surveys to collect first-hand data. Most of the current researches are only involved in theoretical analyses and/or case studies, leading to lack of reliable evidence for their arguments. Unlike the previous researches, this paper fills the gap in the existing literature by applying Hiresman’s Exit-Voice Theory to the objective comparison between the voting behaviors of villagers and their preferences for public goods with the first-hand data collected from 1981 samples of rural households in 10 provinces across China. In addition, it empirically tests the impacts of villagers’ preferences for and satisfaction with various public goods on their voting behavior, further identifying the factors that affect the voters’ participation in elections. The empirical results suggest that: (1) villagers will participate in the village elections if they have demands for public goods, otherwise the probability of “exiting” from the election increases significantly; (2) different villagers have different potential demands for public goods, and will exhibit corresponding voting behaviors to express their interest demands; (3) sources of personal income, level of education and village size have significant impacts on villagers’ participation in the elections, although these impacts vary among different groups. This paper contributes to the existing literature by analyzing the impact of villagers’ satisfaction with public goods supply on their opinions and behaviors as exhibited in their participation in village governance. The first-hand data was collected between July, 2010 and July, 2011 in 100 villages covering 10 provinces, namely, Heilongjiang, Shandong, Anhui, Shaanxi, Sichuan, Inner Mongolia, Hainan, Jiangxi, Zhejiang, and Guizhou. The second contribution of this paper is the Exit-Voice-Theory-based comparative analysis of voting behavior by dividing the voters into groups with different behavioral characteristics, thus effectively reducing the risk of estimation bias.