Study On Citizen Participation In Government Decision-making In Contemporary China

Citizen participation in government decision-making refers to citizen can participate in the formulation and implementation of government decision-making. Citizens who have the participation qualification can be an individual or a group. According to legal procedures, the citizens actively participate in the formulation and implementation of government decision-making. The citizen participation is the practical direction of contemporary government decision-making, it is the foundation of legitimacy, the source of rationality and the soul of feasibility of government decision-making. Citizens’ actively participation can restrict the formulation and implementation of government decision-making directly or indirectly.Athens’ direct democracy is the original version of human theoretical thinking and practical exploration. But direct democracy causes majority encroach on minority interest, participation disorder causes chaos, conflict and unrest, and larger population and vast territory causes unreality of direct democracy, making modern democracy choose representative democracy. Under representative democracy, the people exercise their sovereignty by select their agent, representative democracy is the most stable governing pattern of modern politics. However, western democracy pays more attention to individual freedom, instead of fairness, justice, and public participation. Deliberative democracy emphasizes on citizen who is equipped to participate in political process, on the importance of citizen directly and sufficiently involved in decision making of public affairs. Therefore, only centered on enlarge citizen directly participation in politics, characterized by consult and consensus, aimed at promote public interest, can truly implement democratic spirit. Deliberative democracy is the certain development of internal logic of democratic politics.In the 1980 s, the western’s deliberative democracy theory gradually appeared in front of the Chinese government and citizens. The basic ideas of deliberative democracy are citizens can carefully participate in the formulation and implementation of government decision-making by means of public deliberation and rational communication, discussing and dealing with difficult problems of government decisions together with government, and then expand public interest. In view of the lack of citizen participation in government decision-making in currently China, the right system and institutional construction of citizen participation should be throughout every stage of government decision-making. There are five stages in government decision-making: they are stage of problem posing, stage of program preparing, stage of program selecting, stage of program implementing and stage of program checking. Deliberative democracy provides the ideal solutions to deal with the lack of citizen participation in government decision-making. In the perspective of deliberative democracy theory, put forward the idea of institutional construction about citizen participation in these five stages of government decision-making, to eventually achieve scientization, democratization and legalization of our government decision-making.