Adrienn Reisinger
3. Questionnaire Research
Methodology
The goal of the survey3 was to get information from citizens about their opinions and actions regarding social responsibility. In this paper we use only those data from this questionnaire which relate tothe methods of social responsibility/participation:
The main question is whether the local government has ever asked people about settlement development. If yes, in what way?
We also wanted to know what kind of local forums, etc. the citizens have ever participated in.
Ourlast question was how people felt about the effect they had on the life of their settlement.
Our hypothesis was that less than half of the citizens had had a voice in the de-velopment of their settlement and the citizens having expressed their opinion would feel that they had some effect on the life of their settlement.
3 The survey was made together with my colleague Márta Nárai, PhD, Széchenyi István University.
Social Responsibility and Territorial Development 105 We carried out our paper based and on-line national survey between April 2012 and March 2013. It must be noted that with 1071 people having filled in the ques-tionnaires, our sample is not represent the Hungarian citizens, so we can draw our conclusions only about those who participated.
About half of the sample is under the age of 30, so there are a lot of students (35%). The ratio of women to men is 65%. The ratio of people who have a higher education degree is about 37%, much higher than the average in our society. About three-quarters of our sample live in a town or city.
3.2. Are People Asked for their Opinions by the Local Governments?
Only 28.2% of the sample said that they had been asked by the local government about the development or local issues in their settlement. About 55.7% of them said that they had filled in a questionnaire in settlement issues, also forums were men-tioned quite often (39.2%). Other methods (for example: interviews, telephone or personal surveys) were rarely mentioned. It is very good that 81.8% of these people said they took the opportunity and gave their opinions on a certain issue. 12.5% of people asked were uninterested and 5.7% of them rejected the opportunity. These ratios are not very high, but show that people can be uninterested in these issues even if asked.
Although there are no strong connections, we can say that the following demo-graphic characteristics significantly determined the positive answer:
above the age of 30;
high qualifications;
living in a village;
working as an employee or retired;
married;
high income.
Based on these results, we can conclude that people have more opportunities to voice their opinions in small settlements. Some former research also had the same results (e.g. Nárai 2008, Reisinger 2010). People with higher income and qualifica-tions said in greater number that they had been asked, which is not surprising as they are more interested in local issues, so local governments find them more easily.
Types of Citizen Participation
We were interested in how people took part in the activities of their settlements.
90.1% of the sample said they participated at least on one occasion. It sounds good, but as we can see in Figure 1, most of the sample marked only the election and the referendum which political decisions and not to everyday issues. Besides these, only
106 Adrienn Reisinger local forums were mentioned relatively often (29.5%), which is a citizen participa-tory opportunity provided by the local governments regulated by law. The partici-pants are mainly employed citizens with higher qualifications having a net income above 120,000 Ft (about 400 euros). Public hearing is a similar practice, but it was mentioned only by 9.5% of the sample. Other methods very rarely occur as these are seldom practised in Hungary, if at all.
Of course participation also depends on the local governments, mainly because they organise most of these forums, etc. So if there are no opportunities for the citi-zens provided by the local governments, there is not much left for them to take part in.
Figure 1. Types of citizen participation in percentages (n=1053) Source: Based on the authors’ questionnaire research
3.4. Attitude towards the Effect of their Contribution towards the Settlement
We asked people to rank their feelings about the success of their contribution to the development of their settlement. Figure 2 shows the results. 84.3% of the sample said that their contribution had some effect or no effect at all on the life of their settlement. There is significant relationship between the feeling of contribution and the opportunities given by the local government to citizens to give their opinions.
When people have the opportunity, they usually feel that they have some effect on the affairs of their settlement.
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90
citizen parliament participatory budgeting consensus conference citizens' jury public hearing protesting general meeting deliberative poll future planning local forum referendum election
Social Responsibility and Territorial Development 107
Figure 2. Opinions about the effect of citizen contribution on the life of the settlement given by citizens on a 1 to 10 scale, in percentages (n=1027)
Source: Based on the authors’questionnaire research.
Summary
In the theoretical part of our paper we suggested that social responsibility is the base of settlement or regional development. If citizens and other local players can take responsibility for their own lives, they will be able to do the same for society, too. It means that players feel that they have to do something for the local society by voicing their opinions about the settlement. It is very important that local govern-ments be open to this type of development, namely they have to give citizens the opportunity to speak about their goals, ideas and express their opinions about com-munity affairs. We believe when citizens and other players have this opportunity, it benefits the settlement, because thus every action realised will be accepted by them, resulting in a higher level of satisfaction among people.
In our research we tried to find out what kind of participatory opportunities citizens have at their settlements. We carried out a questionnaire research which was completed by 1071 people. Our hypothesis was that less than half of the citizens had had a voice in the development of their settlement and those citizens who had participated felt that they had some effect on the life of their settlement. Our hypoth-esis was partly correct. Only 28.2% of the sample said that they had been asked by the local government about the settlement’s development and other local issues.
Thisis much lower than expected. On the one hand, it is likely that people are not particularly motivated regarding these issues, but on the other hand, we do not know what the local governments think about this. Maybe local governments are
0 5 10 15 20 25
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
108 Adrienn Reisinger neither particularly active, or on the contrary, they are, but people are not very interested. We only know from these results that people in our sample are not very active. That is why it is no surprise that more than three quarters of these citizens feel they have no effect on the affairs of their settlement. We think that this is not good in the long term, because people will not enjoy living in a community where they cannot give their opinions and ideas as nobody is interested in them. The re-sults support the second part of our hypothesis.
What is the solution? We believe that politicians as well as citizens and other players have to be open to take the opportunities to speak about the future of their settlement. It is true that by this decision-making processes will take longer, but the settlements will be more successful and ultimately such communal processes will benefit both society and the economy in the long run.
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