| Online interactive politics (OIP), an innovation in politics is now driving the political civilization to upgrade in our country. With the continuously moving forwards of OIP practice, its theoretical study has entered the eighth year. This paper focuses on the practical problems and deconstructs them to three parts, which are:the function and mechanism of the OIP platform, the path of governments in OIP, the path of citizen in OIP. Synthetically using the analytical approaches of economics and the theory of communication, I try to discuss the path of OIP’s realization with empirical research method. The content is as follows:In chapter 1, the paper illustrates the research purpose firstly, then describes the way of thinking, research content and innovation, and finally introduces the theoretic tools and methods.In chapter 2, this paper tries to grasp the current domestic and foreign research progress of OIP through literature reviewing so as to find a blank spot. The study found that various political environment make OIP research focuses quite different. The researches written in English on China’s OIP are mainly about the political effects of Internet, electronic government development and online political participation, etc. And researches on network politics in western countries are mainly about online political participation, online election, electronic government and electronic democracy. Domestic OIP researches are mainly on five aspects:the development of OIP, the analysis of OIP concept, the characteristics of OIP, the problems existing in OIP and the solutions to optimize OIP. Therefore, empirical study on the OIP paths of citizen and government agencies at all levels is a blank spot.In chapter 3, the classifications and functions of OIP platforms are analyzed because online platform is the material basis of OIP and the functions are the front desks of platforms. The three dimensions are used to classify the OIP platforms which are the basis running types of OIP, the administrative hierarchy of government agencies, the masters of OIP. So that 10 OIP platforms have been selected for specific analysis, they are www.people.com.cn, www.gov.cn, microblog "Shanghai publication", www.ygcq.com.cn, www.huizhou.gov.cn, www.jiaodong.net/minsheng, wechat "Safe Zhaoqing", www.ttxn.gov.cn and www.fcwlwz.gov.cn. The Functions are analyzed as three parts: access, appeal and interaction. Respectively, "access" describes the basic qualification of OIP, "appeal" describes the details in filling online and "interaction" describes the replies of governments and reviews of citizen. Conclusions of the analysis are:the functions of the microblog platform and Wechat platform are simple and limited and so they can hardly meet the requires of OIP; Online interview is interesting, but its time and topics are subject to certain restrictions, so it can’t work as a regular way; Message boards, mailbox, BBS, which are based on websites can support perfect functions and are more suitable for OIP.In chapter 4, the mechanisms of OIP platform are analyzed and an experience mode is concluded. The mechanism mainly includes working mechanism and monitoring mechanism. Working mechanism means the rules, according to which the platform deal with citizen’s appeals. Monitoring mechanism consists of various types of reports and rankings in order to create some sort of pressure onto government agencies to promote the quality of OIP. On the basis of analyzing functions and mechanisms, the experience mode is put forward, which includes opening three areas, doing two evaluations and carrying out one examination. The three areas are the appeals, the replies and the reviews of OIP. The two evaluations are from the citizen who appeal and others online. The examination means bringing the OIP effects into government performance evaluations.In chapter 5, the paths of OIP are constructed. Obviously OIP includes two directions, citizen to government and government to citizen. Through the study of four municipalities directly under the central government, it is found that the direction of citizen to government rather than the direction of government to citizen is the main form of OIP. Then the framework of is built.In chapter 6, the possible OIP paths of four levels of governments are compared and discussed. After an overview of the OIP platforms on three levels, the OIP paths of four levels of governments are analyzed to answer two questions:participate OIP or not, how to participate. For the government on each level, at first the economics methods of cost-benefit analysis, opportunity cost and substitutes are used to help answer the question of "yes or no". Then, all possible paths are listed and discussed through the diffusion of innovations model so as to answer the question of "how to". In this way, the conclusions are made as followed. For central government, the suggested path is to amalgamate the Petition System with OIP. For the provincial government, the OIP path according to priority is firstly through constructing the provincial OIP platform, then through utilizing the nationwide OIP platform. For the municipal government, the OIP path is firstly through constructing the municipal OIP platform, secondly through utilizing the provincial OIP platform, thirdly through utilizing the nationwide OIP platform. For the government of district or county, the OIP path is firstly through constructing the local OIP platform, secondly through utilizing the municipal OIP platform, thirdly through utilizing the provincial OIP platform, finally through utilizing the nationwide OIP platform. The operation way of central government and provincial government might be supervising the local government agencies to handle the appeals, while the way of the governments at lower levels might be handling the appeals directly. In chapter 7, the OIP path of citizen is analyzed. In order to find out the best path, two typical regions (Longmen county and Pixian county) have been selected to compared the effects of 4 levels of platforms through data mining. The result shows that each OIP platform behaves as a gatekeeper to some extent and there exists two typical path modes which are the grassroots mode and the top mode. Huizhou City represents the grassroots mode, which means the local government wants to solve problems at the grassroots level to achieve "good governance". However, the top mode is using the nationwide OIP platform to discuss problems publicly and then urging the local government to solve them through the pressure of media and the whole society. Finally four principles are put forward for citizens to choose OIP path in accordance with their specific situations, which are the time priority principle, the difficulty priority principle, the efficiency priority principle and the distinguishing complexity principle. |
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