Satisfaction and political-social participation (A survey)

In modern societies participation is considered as a pleasant phenomenon. That can increase social trust, social solidarity and presence of social groups in public and political life in order to achieve sustainable development of society. So, in international level, comprehensive participation of people in social, economic, political and cultural affairs remembered as an indicator of development. Generally, public participation recognized as a fundamental element of a desired social planning. A comprehensive and desired plan is a plan to do with people, not for people (Zimmerman, 1996: 1). However in Iran, in the development and modernization project take less attention in creating mechanisms for public participation and the transfer of some decision-making authority to peoples. As well as destabilizing and dominating the state to the private sphere faced the life word of individuals with many problems. On the other hand, individualistic and hermitistic attitudes embedded in public culture reinforce this. As a result, it has become important to maintain private and individual interests and meantime considering to the collective interests and follow-up them has not been raised. In such circumstances, the exploring factors that influenced public participation to be seen as a vital and necessary principle to strengthen and expand public participation in society. In response to that need, this paper aims to study the effects of political satisfaction and social satisfaction on socio-political participation.
Participation: Inspired by the theoretical and empirical literature can be said that the participation has certain components, for example, voluntary work, cooperate in community affairs, urban and rural, direct or indirect, simple membership in the local communities, charitable and business activities in these organizations, participate in the decision making process, the person engaging in the activity levels of the political system, being a social or political official, organized effort of citizens and influencing political guidance of society. In terms of operational definition, in this paper the socio-political participation measured both subjective (attitudinal) and objective (behavioral) levels. Objective level combined from indicators such as; the spirit of participatory, the individual evaluation of effectiveness in participation and awareness. Also, the objective level combined from indicators such as; participatory membership (the regularity and amount of membership). This scale's stability estimated by Cronbach's alpha to 0.84.
Social satisfaction: The social satisfaction implies the amount of individual's satisfaction of society and community in which to live. This concept represents its own indicators that include personal satisfaction and the satisfaction of social conditions. This scale's stability estimated by Cronbach's alpha to 0.70.
Political satisfaction: the concept of political satisfaction points to the level of satisfaction from political situation, institutions and political leaders and officials (Azimi, 2000). Indicators for this concept are satisfaction from officials and consent from governmental institution's performances. This scale's stability estimated by Cronbach's alpha to 0.85.
In present paper survey used as method. Data gathered by administrating self-constructed questionnaire. The publication combined from all citizens of Karaj that had above 18 years and live in this city by 2011. Using random sampling method 400 citizens selected from mentioned above population for answering the questionnaire. In analyzing the data, the methods of descriptive statistics used for describing the features of sample in demographic and other variables. Also, the relationships between main variables analyzed by inferential statistics tests.
Discotion: Description of demographic variables: 74.8% of respondents are men and rest women. The average mean of sample is 27 old year. 15% of respondents have Bachelor degree in science. 66.5% of respondents are single. Also, the average mean of respondent's income is 706 Tomman per month.
Description of main variables: The mean of respondent's socio-political participation is 43.17, with 12.04 to standard deviation. This suggests that their participation level is mediocre and has very dispersion. In social satisfaction scale 23.8% of respondents have, 55.3% average and 9% high consent. Respectively similar to social in the case of political satisfaction, 62.3% respondents have low, 25.5% middle and 4% high consent. Also, 34.8% of respondents placed in low level, 48.8% in middle level and 11.8% in high level of socio-economic status scale.
Analysis of relations between variables: In terms of two variables relations, the political satisfaction correlated positively and significantly with participation about 0.53. The correlation between social satisfaction and participation is 0.18 and this correlation is significant. Also, the correlation between socio-economic status and participation is -0.065 that not significant statistically. In multiple relations the multiple liner regression analysis showed that the political satisfaction had the most significant effect in the estimation of distribution of participation. Totally, the independent variables could explain up to 30% of variance of socio-political participation.
In this study it was observed that the socio-political participation among citizens of Karaj on average, and even lower-middle. As well as, social and political satisfaction among them is lower than expected. These facts suggest the existence of major problems, which must be carefully explored. In this way, and in the framework of this paper can be point to the effect of political and social satisfaction in contributing to the social and political dimensions. The results showed that along with satisfaction increase (particularly in term of political satisfaction), the participation of individuals will increase dramatically. This fact implies that attraction of people's participation does not only accomplish in condition which is empty from satisfaction but also requires a positive opinion of the current social and political conditions to make it to the experience of participation. These results support the conceptual implications of theories such as the theory of Kinder and Kyvyt and even Inglehart's theory that emphasis the effect of satisfaction from political and social situation of society on the public participation. In this study it was observed that the socio-economic base not significant effect on participation. This fining is not coordinate with some conceptual implications (such as Denis Heily, 1997 and Almond and Powel, 2000) and even with some research in Iran (Like: Hoseini, 2005 and Taghvaei, 2009). Perhaps this could be referred to the substantive difference in the communities which studied and citation of previous researchers to characters of Iran society and strongly and especially to the unique features of observed population. Totally, the results of this study showed that increasing citizen's participation in political and social affairs, regardless of the level of satisfaction, that implies the how meet their needs and expectations of the social, economic and political state of society is not possible. Therefore, public authorities at various levels should regard to this issue as great.