Spatial Construction and Grassroots Willingness to Participate in Democracy: Analytical Framework and Empirical Tests

Abstract

In China, political participation exists as a mainstream understanding of democratic politics. There are many factors that influence citizens' willingness to participate, often pointing to some form of "space"， but few studies have explored the relevance of different forms of space to the willingness to participate in democracy. This study focuses on the grassroots space of NPC deputies' contact stations in China and utilizes data collected from 185 contact stations for empirical analysis. The study adopts the physical, interactional and digital spaces identified in established research and operationalizes their variable indicators, on the basis of which an analytical framework is constructed and hypotheses are formulated. The empirical results show that there is a significant positive correlation between the improvement of the three types of spatial conditions and the willingness to participate in grassroots democracy. It has been proved that promoting grassroots democratic participation willingness through spatial constructs has a positive performance. This study aims to make an empirical test to support the spatial examination of democratic participation and provide an understanding of the spatial construction of grassroots democracy in China.