Social Capital and Civic Engagement : the case study of Taipei ,Taiwan

• Main Authors: CHEN,SHIAO TIN, 陳孝庭
• Other Authors: CHIOU, CHANG-TAY
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2004
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/82449440147443212073

碩士 === 國立臺北大學 === 公共行政暨政策學系 === 92 === This thesis focuses on the relation between social capital and civic engagement. Since Robert D. Putnam publishes his Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, there have been more and more scholars paying attention to the theory of social capital. Moreover, there are numerous empirical researches showing that social capital matters in the field of economic development, criminal prevention, hearth and medical care as well as educational policy. Besides, civic engagement has been the nucleus of democratic theory, including classic democratic theory of J. S. Mill and some contemporary political thoughts from Hannah Arendt and of C. B. Macpherson. However, scholars still do not come to a final conclusion on the contextual relations between social capital and civic engagement. The thesis intends to elaborate some theoretical argument on such contextual relations between social capital and civic engagement. Besides, it applies the logic of empirical research and takes citizens of Taiwan as the objects of study. Results are based on telephone interviews with 807 successful samples through the CATI system of Research Center for Public Opinion and Election Studies in National Taipei University. According to the analysis, there are three conclusions identified as follows: (1) there shows low correlation between social capital and civic engagement, and the results may well generate an equation of “Social Capital = 0.283 Civic Engagement + 2.631,” (2) among all prospects, the engagement of public affairs and social capital are highest correlated, (3) as for social contextual factors, “age” and “economic status” are significant to social capital and civic engagement, “education” is also significant to civic engagement, and “district” and “sex” are neither significant to civic engagement nor social capital.