The purpose of this study is to diagnose and understand how social capital affects community member’s actual political participation. The primary purpose of this study specifically focuses on investigating whether several features of social capital ...
The purpose of this study is to diagnose and understand how social capital affects community member’s actual political participation. The primary purpose of this study specifically focuses on investigating whether several features of social capital in the local community like the involvement of local community members, neighborhood exchange, attachment to local community, and collective efficacy have effects on voting participation local community involvement or not. Voting participation is the official political activity in election and local community involvement has involved with solving the local problems and effects of various types of local involvement activity.
The empirical analysis has been carried out by applying general multiple regression and parameter mediated regression analyses to 843 Daejeon city residents' survey responses.
As analysis results, social capital has emphasis on networks among local community members in the structural aspect and has a tendency in emphasizing on the trust and the reciprocity based on member’s networks in the cultural aspect. This shows that the relationship of local community members or the attitude of geographic space affect political participation and the social involvement a lot. To expand the political participation of citizens, the endeavor of strengthening the official and unofficial ties of local community members should be increased. Moreover, this suggests that one should have conscious effort on the identity and attachment for the geographic space which one lives in.
To verify this, political efficacy and neighborhood exchange has been analyzed. Political efficacy has affected weakly in the involvement of local society and voting participation. On the other hand, the involvement of local society and voting participation has affected strongly regardless of political efficacy in case of neighborhood exchange. With these results, one possibility is that an increase in the relative significance of mobilized voting and not an increase in the voluntary voting can be drawn in the local community election unlike other types of elections. Local community election has lower interest than other presidential elections and parliamentary elections and it is difficult to induce voluntary voting. Moreover, this suggests that the size of constituency is small and personal networks are relatively strong. It shows that the possibility of mobilized voting is high in the elderly residents area and suburb area. In case of the common resident houses, the formation of networks is easier than the single house resident area. In the aspect that the rate of showing homogeneous common interest is high and mobilized cost is not expensive, these area can easily become the target of mobilized voting. Especially, it is suggested that the possibility of mobilized voting can be very high in the low-income residents area.
The role of neighborhood exchange and communication through local community involvement can be extensively and variously deployed. Participation of local communities through the cooperation of neighbors and induced according to the distribution of income, level of education and social capital, conflict resolution, the influence of community involvement and voter participation and political participation, problem solving, and will put a lot of weight
Based on the empirical results, this thesis provide the following suggestions. First of all, we have to recognize the importance of social capital built on the resident relationship mediated by the space such as neighborhood for representative and participatory democracy. Secondly, there must be more social effort to activate community organizations. Especially it should be emphasized for local government to take facilitative or catalystic role to promote people to organize and participate voluntary associations by means of social atmosphere building and institutional support. Thirdly, considering the importance of home ownership and length of stay on social capital more effort should be made to secure the residential stability. For it, it is necessary to make various effort including prevention of urban sprawl, protection of original residents in urban regeneration process, and measures to improve residential welfare of low income class. Forth, at least from a social capital perspective, we should review and change the apartment centered housing supply policy. More effort is needed to promote detached housing area as well as public space in public housing area. Fifth, there must be community program development to take advantage of community social capital of the elderly. Sixth, we should be concerned with the low neighboring of highly educated people and develop community programs to induce them to be more involved with and contribute their expertize and talents to neighborhood activities.