How does perceptions of social justice affect farmers’ political participation?—Evidence from China

by Zijian He

Ronald Inglehart’s postmaterialist theory suggests that with the advancement of industrialization and economic prosperity, there will be a significant transformation in people’s societal values. Concurrently, their forms of political participation shift from conventional activities to unconventional politic activities. However, most research on this topic has been predominantly focused on Western countries. In fact, rural farmers in China serve as an excellent experimental group for testing this theory since they have experienced rapid economic growth while still being deeply influenced by traditional authoritarianism culture.Using a sample of 6,689 respondents from the 2019 Chinese Social Survey (CSS) and employing a Binary Logistic Regression Model, we discovered that Chinese farmers’ perception of overall societal justice exhibits a U-shaped relationship with various forms of political participation. Specifically, it shows a significant negative correlation with non-institutional political participation, such as contact-officer participation, but a significant positive correlation with institutional political participation types like community participation and election participation.Our further research indicates that the three subtypes of perception of societal justice are significantly negatively correlated only with non-institutional political participation, while their statistical relationship with institutional political participation is not significant. We believe that the underlying reason for this phenomenon lies in the unique interpretation of societal justice within Chinese traditional culture. Additionally, through a comparative analysis of models on political participation behavior and willingness, we found that despite significant inequalities and disparities in institutional structures and levels of economic development between rural and urban areas in China, rational considerations of the risks and costs associated with defying the government deter Chinese farmers from engaging in non-institutional politic activities unless their emotional resentment towards unjust practices reaches a certain threshold.