The participation of villagers is of great significance for safeguarding the legitimate rights and interests of villagers, promoting the modernization of rural governance, and contributing to socio-economic development. In practice, however, the serious lack of substantive participation by villagers in village governance has led to the village gradually becoming a public space vacuum. The issue of how to enhance villager participation in public affairs is one of the key obstacles to rural revitalization.

The root cause of the lack of villager participation in public affairs is the weak relationship between the villagers and the village collectives. To enhance the participation of villagers in public affairs, we should rebuild the relationship between the villagers and the village collectives. The rural collective economy is an important institutional basis for rebuilding the relationship between the villagers and the village collectives. Reform of the shareholding cooperative system for collective rural property rights is expected to reconstruct an appropriate relationship between the villagers and the village collectives, thus it will have an impact on village governance patterns.

Based on the governance effects of the reform of the collective property rights system, this study explores the internal mechanisms in the reform of the shareholding cooperative system that have an effect on villager participation in public affairs, and it draws the following main conclusions. First, the reform of the shareholding cooperative system promotes villager participation in public affairs by improving the village participation system and enhancing the villagers' consciousness of their rights. Second, there is a certain heterogeneity in the impact of the shareholding cooperative system reform on villager participation in public affairs. The shareholding cooperative system reform in villages without grid management has a stronger impact on villager participation in public affairs than it does in villages with grid management. In addition, the geographical location of the villages is an important factor affecting whether or not the reform will improve villager participation in public affairs. In villages that are closer to urban areas and that have a higher value and an easier realization of collective assets villagers tend to pay more attention to collective interests, making the reform of the shareholding cooperative system more effective in enhancing villager participation in public affairs. Third, at this stage the reform still has failed to improve the influence of villagers on decision-making and supervision of public affairs, which may reveal that villager participation is still at a formalistic stage and improvements are still needed in the democratic level of village governance.

The marginal contributions of this study are as follows. First, a quantitative analytical method is used to carry out an in-depth analysis on the direction, intensity, and mechanism of the reform of the shareholding cooperative system that have an effect on villager participation in public affairs. This is a useful supplement to existing research. Second, this study, in examining the impact of the reform of the shareholding cooperative system on villager participation in various public affairs, expands our knowledge about relevant research on villager participation behavior. Third, the focus on the differences among villages and on the existing problems in the effects of the reform of the shareholding cooperative system provide useful enlightenment for future policy formulation and implementation.