The impact of institutional guarantee on citizens' participation in grassroots social governance: promotion or inhibition?

Abstract

Institution is a crucial tool for governing a country. Taking good institution as the cornerstone and promoting the extensive participation of citizens is the important guarantee to realize the modernization of Chinese style grassroots social governance. This article employs the "institution-behavior" analytical framework and utilizes the CSS2017-CSS2019 mixed-sectional data to comparatively analyze the impact and mechanisms of institutional guarantee on citizens' institutional participation, consultative participation and feedback participation in grassroots social governance. The study findings reveal that institutional guarantee promote citizen's institutional participation and consultative participation in grassroots social governance, while inhibiting citizen's feedback participatory behavior. Individual norms, as a form of obligation, exhibit varying degrees of mediating effects or masking effects in the relationship between institutional guarantee and citizen participation in grassroots social governance. Behavioral control plays a negative regulating role in institutional guarantee and citizens' feedback participation. In other words, behavioral control suppresses the negative impact of institutional guarantee on citizens' feedback participation in grassroots social governance. Outcome consciousness has a negative regulating effect between the institutional guarantee and the citizens' institutional participation. In other words, outcome consciousness negatively moderates the positive influence of the institutional guarantee on the citizens' institutional participation in the grassroots social governance.