It's inevitable that the construction of responsible government requires the government and its bureaucratic system to make timely, direct and effective response to the public appeal within its jurisdiction. And the improvement of government responsiveness is not only an important way to build up a more positive image of the government, but also the essential requirement and responsibility of the government to perform its public service. What is more important is that the construction of government responsiveness makes for improving the rationality of public policy. On this basis, the construction of government responsiveness will perfect the government accountability mechanism, which also represents a leap in the development of democracy. In this light, the thesis will make a preliminary discussion of our local government's responsiveness with the goal orientation of constructing responsible government from five aspects, which are theoretical interpretation, measurement system construction, empirical case study, restricting factors analysis and countermeasures. The dissertation covers the following contents:There are, in the development of public administration study, two intertwining paradigms about the government responsiveness, namely, the efficiency-centered management approach and justice-and-democracy-centered constitutionalist approach. The government response in this dissertation refers to the process and related institutional arrangements of government making positive response to the public demands and wills according to legal provision, with the aim of serving the people in its social management activities. While the government responsiveness is a reflection of government's ability in making timely and responsible reaction and response to all sorts of appeal from the public and other social organizations in public management process. The value orientation of local government responsiveness is divided into two levels:the obligation of pursuing fairness, justice and democracy, and practical value of pursuing efficiency, inclusive growth and science and the rule of laws. The logical basis of government response is the power agency relationship between the public and government, and "responsibility drive" is the connotation of flow model of government response. The key points of constructing government responsiveness are the core elements of imitativeness, transparency, sufficiency and rapidity, catching the first time or the best opportunity, and making the responsible government and responsible media as the basic approach to its responsiveness.The assessment system of local government responsiveness is supposed to include seven components:assessment subject, assessment object, assessment objective, assessment standard, assessment index, assessment method and assessment report. This system has four special functions of realizing and implementing government responsibility, developing the efficiency of government governing, improving the relationship between government and public, and enhancing the effectiveness of government. The construction of assessment system must follow the principles of service orientation, function basis and development adjustment, and its system flow should follow the three basic links in the order of function orientation, project design and function inspection. The assessment of local government responsiveness is to make comprehensive assessment about the efficiency, benefit, competence, service quality, public responsibility and customer satisfaction, etc of government response from three dimensions of breadth, depth and validity of government response. Based on this, the thesis constructs an assessment index system of local government response ability, which includes 3 dimensions,8categories and 20 single targets.This thesis selects three typical cases:the open-heartedness of Wuhan Municipal Government's inclusion of "six even number" scandal of affordable housing in its annual government report, the rapid responsiveness of Chengdu Municipal Government's five press conferences in three days after the event of bus burning, and the institutional innovation of "two-way interaction" adopted by the local government of Shenzhen Nanshan District in encouraging the general public's participation in the construction of harmonious community. From the three case studies, the dissertation tries to make an empirical study on previously mentioned connotation, contents, flows and standards of local government responsiveness from the following three aspects of response process, the assessment of responsiveness, and the construction of responsiveness in similar situation. The revelation of these three cases about local government responsiveness construction includes, local government should face problems directly; government should respond to the public appeals timely by adopting distinctive response strategies and improve institutions in the light of specific cases and events; the government's public relations in crisis must achieve information publicity and information transparency, and use the institutional innovation to respond to general and overall grassroots social contradictions or public benefit appeals.Government responsiveness is determined by the balance between public demands and government response (namely Pareto Optimality). The balance needs to put forward reform strategy (by altering the existing resource allocation) on the basis of exploring the restricting factors when constructing local government's real life responsiveness. This thesis argues that the restricting factors of constructing local government responsiveness in China include, the imperfectness of democratic politics of responsible government which leads to the closed field in authoritative center, and the inertial influence of traditional administrative culture which leads to the government's insufficient knowledge of and difficulty in carrying out its own responsibility. The time-lag of the political system reform is the real deep reason which hinders the construction of responsible government and the improvement of local government responsiveness.The thesis concludes with countermeasures of improving local government responsiveness in the light of constructing responsible government. The countermeasures include, achieving the ecological optimization of responsible government through redesigning the relationship between state and society; achieving the subjective environment optimization of responsible government through redesigning the administrative ethics; achieving the self-optimization in the construction of responsible government through transforming the organizational structure; enhancing the modern technical support of responsible government through perfecting the electronic government response platform. And the thesis also suggests making the promotion of citizens' political participation as the core mission of constructing the responsible government and improving the local government responsiveness.
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