Views On Evaluating System Of Government Integrity

The quality of being honest and credible, as the foundation stone of moral concept, has characterized the basic social behaviors and standardized the code of ethics since the very beginning. Through the transformation of our country from socialist planned economy to market economy, the lack of honesty and credibility has been, somehow, becoming a serious problem found in various fields, such as education, health care, business and tourism. To resolve this issue, government integrity plays a leading role in building an honest and credible society, and is the number one factor to enhance credibility of the government itself. The report to the Eighteenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China points out that we should carry our thorough education to address serious ethical problems, and step up efforts to enhance government integrity, business and social ethics and judicial integrity. The government work report of2013has also pointed out that we should promote a creditability system, use political integrity to improve business and public integrity, and foster healthy social conduct. In order to realize the government integrity, therefore, it is critical to evaluate both objectively and fairly. Such an evaluation system requires us to understand, how acceptable the realization of government integrity is to the public, what factors that may affect the evaluation process, who is responsible to evaluate, what the evaluation criteria are, and how we are going evaluate, and all that decides the results of evaluation. Hence, we need to establish a scientific government integrity evaluating system to help realize government integrity by providing theoretical and practical guidance.According to the principles of evaluation theory, the establishment of government integrity, which has been logically based on a general framework that takes into account essential concepts, influential factors, who are responsible to evaluate, evaluation criteria, and evaluating methods, eventually helps us to understand some major questions such as what is the evaluation for, who are responsible to evaluate, what standards should be applied to the evaluating process, and how should we evaluate. This evaluation process, based on government policies, shows comprehensively how government integrity is to be realized in terms of the manner and capability. Essentially both the government and the public value the performance of any public-orientated activities conducted by government. This is the answer to the primary question, what the evaluation is for. As a dynamic process full of interactions between government and the public, there must have been emerged many factors that may distort the evaluation outcomes, such as explicit and implicit factors from evaluator itself; failure in realizing the government integrity, transformation of administrative function and limit in forms of organization from the side of the government; the past record, the social surroundings and even matters of time and space in terms of the environment. Considering the essence of evaluation of government integrity, the public is the ultimate and substantive body of the evaluation process, and all government activities aim at meeting the demands of the public. As individuals, however, the public ought to evaluate governments via certain organizations or agencies. Therefore, the evaluating of government integrity, by a three-in-one evaluating mode in a comprehensive manner, is led by self-evaluation from government itself, accompanied with evaluations from social organizations and the third parties. This is the answer to the second question, who are responsible to evaluate. The third question, what standards should be applied to the evaluating process, is the core content and the prerequisite of the whole evaluating system. It plays an important role in standardizing the evaluation standards as a ruler, while connecting the government and the evaluators as a bridge. Considering the public demands, administrative activities in real-life issues, and coherence in spirit, words and conduct, we should judge by whether the government has satisfied the expectation of the public guided by their good faith, value and integrity; whether the regulations are fair, legal and effective; whether the government works in a manner of integrity and competence. To conclude, we shall answer the question of how to evaluate, by establishing an ambiguous comprehensive evaluating technique, on the basis of making clear what the evaluation is for, what factors that may determine the outcomes, who should evaluate, and what the evaluating standards should be utilized.