个体规范与公共行动:制度信任如何促进公众回应性参与?——基于城市水环境诉求的文本数据分析

Individual Norms and Public Action:How Does Institutional Trust Facilitate Responsive Public Participation?——A Text Data Analysis Based on Urban Water Environment Appeals

制度信任不是社会力量的简单映射,而是镶嵌在关系、心理、情感等微观情景之中,对治理过程中的公民参与行为具有重要的调适作用。本文采用一个整合性的行为分析机制,利用机器学习和实地调研方式获取福州市民关于水环境诉求的数据,通过实证分析讨论制度信任对公民环境参与意愿的影响效果和作用机制。研究发现:制度信任对个体参与黑臭水体治理的意愿具有直接正面效应,也能够通过个体规范对其产生间接的正向影响,且这种中介效应受到公民结果意识和行为控制的负向调节;个体制度信任感越低,利己倾向越强,结果意识对其参与意愿的调节作用越大,个体制度信任感越强,利他精神越好,结果意识的调节作用越弱;个体制度信任感越强,行为控制对其参与意愿的调节作用越弱,反之,制度信任感越低的公众,受行为控制调节作用更大。文章指出了环境领域的制度信任具有差序分化的异质特点,为理解心理层面的个体规范与行为层面的公共行动之间的关系提供了新的解释和证据,也有助于决策层面更加重视内生性制度的建设,实施差异性的干预机制,提供更多促进亲环境行为的制度要素。

The objective of this paper is to discuss the effect and mechanism of institutional trust on citizens’ willingness to participate in the environment. This paper make use of machine learning and field research,with the environmental demands data collected in Fuzhou City, China. The study found that: Institutional trust not only has a direct positive effect on individuals’ willingness to participate in the governance of black and smelly river, but also have an indirect positive effect on it through individual norms, and this intermediary effect is negatively regulated by citizens’ result awareness and behavioral control. The lower the individual institutional trust, the stronger the self-interest tendency, and the greater the effect of result awareness on its willingness to participate. The stronger the individual institutional trust, the better the altruism, and the weaker the effect of result awareness. The stronger the civic institutional trust, the weaker the role of behavior control in regulating their willingness to participate. Conversely, the lower the institutional trust in the public, the greater the role of behavior control. The key limitation of the study is that it only analyzes the impact of institutional trust on citizens’ environmental participation from the perspective of individuals. Another limitation is that it uses the text data crawled to construct variables in the process of causal identification, which cannot completely solve the problem of bias caused by missing variables. The decision-making level should pay more attention to the construction of endogenous institutions, implement differentiated intervention mechanisms, and provide more institutional elements to promote pro-environmental behavior. The study points out that institutional trust in the environmental field has the heterogeneous characteristics of differential differentiation, also provides new explanations and evidence for understanding the relationship between individual norms at the psychological level and public actions at the behavioral level.