Neighbourhood social capital and political participation in neighbourhood governance: The case of Beijing, China

Abstract

Determinants of individual participation in neighbourhood public affairs have been subject to growing scholarly interest. Urban scholars have adopted the social capital perspective to understanding both informal forms of civic engagement and formal participation in local politics. However, given the mixed findings from the existing literature, whether the social capital theory applies to understanding neighbourhood political participation in Chinese cities requires further investigation. This paper thus examines, in the context of housing marketization and neighbourhood governance reforms, the extent to which neighbourhood social capital promotes neighbourhood political participation among urban residents in China. Using data from a large-scale questionnaire survey conducted in 2017 in Beijing, China, we conducted statistical analysis and found an overall positive relationship between neighbourhood social capital and voting behaviour in neighbourhood elections. However, not all dimensions of social capital are significant, and the positive effects are more salient in newly-developed neighbourhoods of private governance, but not in traditional neighbourhoods in Beijing. These findings extend the international literature on the social capital theory of neighbourhood political participation with additional evidence from a developing country, while also contributing to an emerging line of inquiry on the determinants of civic engagement in neighbourhood governance in transitional urban China.