集体产权改革与村庄信任增进:一个实证研究

Rural Collective Property Rights System Reform and Trust Enhancement in Villages: An Empirical Study

信任对村庄社会秩序构建和经济发展具有良好的润滑作用。以股份合作为主要形式的农村集体产权制度改革,不仅能促进集体经济发展和农民增收,而且对村庄信任也具有积极的增进作用。研究发现,股份合作制改革对村庄的制度信任和人际信任均有显著的正向影响,其中对村党支部等村级组织和同村人的信任促进作用最大,并在村庄和农民个体层面均存在一定的影响异质性。因此,要以农村集体产权制度改革为契机,重塑和培育新时代乡村信任体系,推进政策协同设计与集成改革,加强村级组织和干部队伍建设工作,以数字技术加强对集体“三资”的管理和监管,提高村庄信任水平和乡村公共情感治理绩效。

As a key dimension of emotional governance in rural communities, trust plays a key role in lubricating the construction of social order and economic development in villages. Due to the mobility of rural population, the weakening of collective identity and the loss of collective assets, the traditional trust system in villages is gradually disappearing, which is reflected by the weakening of trust on both the formal institutions and interpersonal relationships. The reform of rural collective property rights, as an important institutional innovation, not only involves the growth and development of the rural collective economy and protects the villagers’ property rights and interests, but also has an important impact on the reconstruction of the trust system within a village. There have been a rich body of researches on the former aspect of performance, but the latter has received little attention from scholars and empirical research on the trust of the reform in the village is rare. In order to fill this research gap,this study creatively explores the spillover impact of the rural collective property rights system reform on the trust from the perspective of institutional evolution and property rights order change, by using the survey data of 1, 657 farmers from 87 villages in 18 provinces. The study enriches and expands the research on the relationship between collective property rights reform and effective rural governance.The main findings of this study are as follows. First, as for institutional trust, the rural collective property rights system reform has a significant positive impact on the villagers’ trust on village Party branches, village committees and local judicial departments, among which the impact on village Party branches is the strongest, followed by that on village committees. However, the rural collective property rights system reform does not have any significant effect on the villagers’ trust on the county and township governments. As for interpersonal trust, the reform significantly promotes the villagers’ interpersonal trust on their relatives and friends, close neighbors and other fellow villagers, among which the impact on the trust on the other fellow villagers is the greatest. The above estimation results have passed the robustness test. The impact of the reform on the trust on outsiders is not significant,because outsiders are not direct stakeholders of the reform in the village. The effects of collective property rights system reform on village trust are heterogeneous. At the village level, the impact of the reform on the trust on village Party branches and village committees is larger in non-traditional villages in coastal areas, while the effect of trust on the local judiciary is larger in traditional villages in coastal areas. The effects are significantly positive in non-traditional villages and coastal villages. Based on an analysis on individual farmers, the effect of trust on the “two committees” of the villages is larger for farmers engaged in non-agricultural work than for those who are only engaged in farming. In addition,the reform of the rural collective property rights system enhances the role of village cadres as village agents, improves the work style of performing their duties, and actively safeguards the interests of the village, which effectively eases the relationship between the cadres and the villagers and reshapes the village trust system.The above results have important implications for the coordinated promotion of rural collective property rights system reform and public emotion governance in villages. First, the government should take the reform of the rural collective property right system as an opportunity to speed up the cultivation and construction of the village trust system, and promote the material and spiritual prosperity of the villagers. Second, it is desirable to strengthen the construction of village organizations and cadre team,thereby to fortify the dual roles of village cadres as state agents and community agents. The cadre team should not only implement the policies of higher level governmental organizations, but also actively deliver the demands of the villagers upwards, thus to improve the villagers’ trust on the formal institutions and their sense of collective identity.