Why Does Villager Participate in Grass-root Election in Rural China? Perspective from Village Public Goods Demand

摘要

Grass-root election in rural China is the hot issue concerned by many scholars. Although most of them study the impact factors of the villagers to participate in the election, they did not answer what's the economic incentive for villagers to participate in the election, this article explains it insentively. First we propose a theoretic hypothesis regarding to grass-root election based on Tiebout's public finance theory, then introduce three variables to measure household's demand for three different public goods provided by village. Furthermore, we use the village survey data from rural China to build Logit and Probit model to test the hypothesis. The empirical results show that three coefficients are significant positive, which means the household who has more village public goods demand has more likely to take part in grass-root election. This result directly reveals the household's incentive for grass-root election and it can help us to understand the effect of election on public goods provision.