Actors And System In Interaction:Study On China’s County-level Government’s Policy Implementation

Internationally renowned political scientist Frank J. Goodnow divided state functions into two categories:politics and administration. With the gradual development of human civilization and the steady increase of democracy, the view was once subject to questioning and criticism in academia. However, from the positive point of view, it shows the important role of the execution of administration in government’s administrative process. In China’s context, because of low level of legal construction and "local interest" exists between local governments, the concept of policies implementation of government departments is weak, alternative implementation, mechanical implementation, symbolic execution, additional implementation as well as the phenomenon of selective implementation happen sometimes. County governments dealing with public issues directly, whose execution level is directly related to the construction of a harmonious socialist society and service-oriented government building. Thus, study on the county-level government’s policy implementation capacity obviously has important theoretical significance and value.In this paper, I take the scientific concept of development as well as the socialist core values as the guiding ideology, and combine variety of research methods like normative research and empirical studies, qualitative and quantitative research, systems analysis and comparative analysis, use Swedish scholar Tom R. Burns’ ASD structural model on analysis of economic and social change, choose a number of specific cities and counties in Hubei province, from three dimensions:public policy actors, institutional environment and cultural heritage, systematic and comprehensive analyze the reality of county-level government policy execution, institutional barriers, causes, and suggestions.This paper covers three parts:introduction, five chapters, and conclusion, of which the five chapters are the main part.The introduction is the lead part, mainly addresses on the background of research questions, including research meaning, important concepts, theory introduction, research methods and innovations.The five Chapters are the main part of this paper, they are mainly based on the ASD model, firstly, I analyze the actors in the county-level government’s public policy implementation; And then, discourse causality of institutional system from the relationship between institution and implementation; Follow with revealing the interaction relationship between environmental and implementation and exploring the relationship between policy tools and policy implementation. Finally, address suggestions to optimize the structure of county-level government’s policy implementation, the concrete expansion as follows: Chapter I described actors in county-level government’s policies implementation. This chapter begins with definition and explanation of county-level government’s policies implementation,and then rise expectation on county-level government’s interaction depending on explanation of behavioral logic, operation rules and features. Then, starting from the actual situation in China, reveal the real situation of our county-level government actors with mining the deep-seated reasons; Finally put forward suggestions depending on four aspects of the third sector:cracking the structure of the bureaucracy, strengthening the political and social features, strengthening the policy advocacy and cultivation.Chapter Ⅱ discusses institutional causality between system and implementation. This chapter takes the perspective of government ecology,investigation on the basis of the three counties in Hubei Province, analyzes county-level governments’ rules system,rules structure,ways of implementation,performance appraisal, and try to explore interaction mechanism of county-level governments in order to reveal relationships between system and execution environment.Chapter III depending on three counties’ Yearbooks and depth interviews explores environment system’s impact on policy implementation from four aspects:county’s political environment; county’s economic environment; county’s cultural environment and county’s social environment. This chapter firstly describes the interaction mechanism of the formation of environment,and then, explores the feasibility of the embedded interactive mode, and follows from the elements like political, economic, cultural and social environmental factors. Finally, puts forwards suggestions on policy implementation from policy environment’s effective interaction.Chapter IV discusses the relationship between the tool of the government and public policy implementation. This chapter first introduces the concepts, classifications and characteristics of government tools, and analyzes relevant factors which influent government tools’ selecting, and put forward the concept of adaptation between the tool of the government and policy actors; Second, runs a comparative analysis of research methods, finally, take one-child policy as an example, expounds the possibility and feasible paths on adaptation of policy instruments for county-level governments.Chapter V discusses the structure of county governments’policy implementation. This chapter as value orientation and policy recognition the basic premise of China’s county-level governments policies implementation discusses two dimensions as:the mutual balance of the actors and institutional rules and interactive adaptation realistic path for the structural optimization of policies implementation; Finally,I argue that the optimization of implementation structural must rely on technical process reengineering and e-government construction.The last part of the this paper collates and summarizes conclusions and expected outlooks. The chapter argues that, depends on the ASD analysis model, the level of policy implementation and capacity of county government in China have made great development and progress. Actors constantly optimize and supporting systems of policies implementation continually be improved, however, through systematic research,I found that there are still many places to improve between county-level governments’ policy implementation and action,between supporting system and execution environment. Finally, I predict that the future research should be focused on "how to build a multi-channel, multi-level policy oversight body, how to establish a sound scientific policy implementation evaluation system, how to start accountability mechanisms of policies implementation"...