| Summary: | 碩士 === 東海大學 === 政治學系 === 104 === It is important to investigate the correlation between college student’s social participation and political efficacy. Although there is not enough resource (money and power) for college students and meanwhile they are often overlooked by the mainstream society, their active participation in politics (protest, voting) in recent years has had profound effects on the society. In addition, they are also no longer indifferent to politics, and so politicians started caring a lot about their opinion once more. Therefore, it is increasingly meaningful to discuss their political attitudes, political efficacy and political participation.
Our research design is that we collect a random sample of college students in the middle Taiwan. The population of this study includes seniors in 11 colleges in Taichung, Chunghwa, and Yunlin. Based on the population, therefore, I gather the sample that has a sample size of 560. This research aims to understand the correlations between social movement and political efficacy among college students, via investigating “318 Sunflower Movement.” In addition, personal participation and online participation in 318 Sunflower Movement matters differently to their associations with political efficacies, and therefore are discussed about in this study.
In addition, I am interested in exploring college student’s political efficacy and the extent to which political efficacy explains voting behavior. The measurement of voting behaviors are “9 in 1 election“ in 2014 and the “presidential election” in 2016. The signature contribution of this study is to create a specific measurement of political efficacy in the context of “sunflower student movement” and name it as “Sunflower political efficacy”
This statistical results generally supports my hypotheses. First, college student’s social movement could really effectively explain their political efficacy. In terms of political participation, “on-line participation” has more explanatory power than “personal participation” of political efficacy. To my surprise, “personal participation in Sunflower Movement” is inversely related to political efficacy. This is probably because students going to Movement in person will even cause their frustration that they are not able to change the political system. Second, the “external political efficacy” could effectively explain the college students’ voting participation. Specifically, expected voting participation is likely to be overestimated in this study. Finally, the measure “Sunflower political efficacy” does have more explanatory power than the typical measure “political efficacy” so as to explain political participation.
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