Against the backdrop of global population aging, social participation has been widely regarded as a key pathway to promote the mental health of older adults. However, existing studies often overlook the self-selection bias rooted in cumulative advantage, which may lead to an overestimation of participation effects. Based on the 2023 Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS), this study examines the real effect of social participation on mental health among older Chinese adults using Propensity Score Matching (PSM) to strip out the interference of institutional capital and psychological baselines. The matching covariate set innovatively incorporates Communist Party membership as institutional capital, alongside life satisfaction and perceived social fairness as psychological baseline variables, to more thoroughly identify the sources of selection effects. Ordered logistic regression shows that the composite social participation index is significantly positively associated with mental health, but heterogeneity analysis reveals that this effect is almost entirely driven by formal participation (voting), while informal participation is not statistically significant. After PSM removes cumulative advantage effects, the average treatment effect (ATT) of the composite index decreases by roughly one-third but remains significant, whereas sub-dimensional ATTs become non-significant. The findings confirm a dual structure of “selection gateway plus participation effect” and suggest that active aging policy in China should shift from mobilizing participation to empowering participation, lowering thresholds for disadvantaged older adults so that participation dividends extend from advantaged groups to all older adults.
Huanqi Niu (Tue,) studied this question.