The Research On Public Participation In Local Government’s Governance-oriented Performance Evaluation

Since the 1980s, the government performance evaluation, as the important management tool to improve and enhance the government performance, has been introduced into China. With the implementation and practice of government performance evaluation, it promotes the administrative reform and the improvement of the government performance, and also it became the important paths for the citizen to participate in public affairs and influence the government performance evaluation process. But from the local government performance evaluation practice, government performance evaluation is still a top-down and management model, be led and controlled by the government, management and control is the basic characteristic of this management model, third parties outside the government, social organizations and ordinary citizens lack the policy and institution space to participate the government performance evaluation process. While some local governments are also actively promoting the NGOs and citizen to participate the government performance evaluation, but that kind of participation is more of a mobilization or passive participation. Social bodies outside the government have not been the core and the main body in the process of the government performance management, their influence towards government performance remains limited. From the perspective of social reality, China’s civil society has become more sophisticated, the ability and desire of the Social bodies outside the government including agencies or private citizens to participate public affairs management has constantly been enhanced,they have achieve the basic conditions to participate in government performance governance, but the systems design about citizen participation and related theories reserves cannot meet the reality need of the development of citizens society. In this social background, we will reserarch citizens outside the government (including third party) how to participate the government performance governance from the perspective of governance, and then to promote the transformation of traditional government performance evaluation mechanism from the traditional top-down Managed evaluation mode carried out within the administrative system to the governance mode of the local government performance evaluation based on collaboration and trust between the local government and the public. The research about citizen participation has a very important practical significance and theoretical valuefor the promotion of local government performance evaluation system and the government performance governance based on public value.The whole idea is to expand basedon management, trying to construct the theoretical model about citizen participation in the governance-mode of Local Government Performance Evaluation from the governance perspective, taking the public value as the core, combined with the three powers (the right to organize, the right to evaluate and the right to manage) of government performance evaluation and the five dimensions (the dominant right of the public to participate;the depth degree of public participation in government performance evaluation; the degree oftransparency for the government performance information, the degree of communication between the government and the public and the degree of sustainable development about the citizen participation in local government governance mechanism),and then we will study the citizen participation mechanisms and paths in the process of the Local Government Performance Evaluation. During the study, we will examine the problems of the civic participation in the process of local government performance evaluation from two perspectives of government and society. We hope that we can put forward the reference frame about the theory and the system design of the local Government’s administrative reform and the involvement of public participation in the government performance evaluation through the systematic study of the citizen participation mechanisms in the process of the local government performance evaluation.The first chapter of this thesis is the introduction, it mainly put forwards the research question、research background and significance of this thesis, the research ideas, methods and frameworks as well as the theoretical innovation are proposed based on the combed the relative research literature. The second chapter’s main content is to provide the theoretical basis of this thesis from the governance perspective.In the third Chapter, the core concepts, such as public values, governance-oriented government performance evaluation and public participation, are proposed. The research questions of this thesis are clearly presented, and then we analyze the basic elements of citizen participation mechanisms:the motivation of citizen participation, the main bodies of citizen participation, the fields and scope of citizen participation and the ways for citizens to participate. It provides a theoretical framework for citizen participation in governance-oriented government performance evaluation. Chapter VI’s main content is to constructe the theoretical model of citizen participation in governance-oriented government performance evaluation, which has become the main analytical framework content of the following relative content of this thesis.Chapter V’s main content is to observe and study the reality of citizen participate in government performance evaluation, based on the performance evaluation of local government, combined with the obtained information from the analysis of the survey data and a typical case of domestic citizen engagement, we study the experiences of citizen participation in government performance evaluation at home and abroad, the basic issuesof citizen participation is more clear, all this civic provides references involved for the construction of citizen participation mechanisms.TheChapter VI’s main content is to put forward the mechanisms and path of citizen participation in governance-oriented government performance evaluation, which providing the institutional design and theoretical referencefor the public to participate the process of the governance-oriented government performance evaluation.In this thesis, we mainly use the research methods of standardized research methodology, comparative research method and case study approach. By using this research method, we put forward analysis theoretical framework of governance-oriented government performance evaluation. Based on the basic content of the framework, we deeply study the problems and difficulties for the citizen to participate the process of the local government performance evaluation by suing questionnaire survey and case studies; we simultaneously provide a reference for the improvement of citizen participation mechanisms in governance-oriented government performance evaluation through the analysis of typical cases at home and abroad. We hope that we can promote top-level design for the local government performance management reform, push the transformation of the mode about the local government evaluation from management-oriented to governance-oriented in China by the systematical research of citizen participation, By this way, can we promote the reform of local government performance management system and really promote the local governments to be responsible for the Public who are directly accept and consume the public goods and public services that provided by the local government as well as the superior governments or the central government, promote the government performance management to be really carried out under the constraintsand control of public value. The government and the citizens need to adjust their position and role to each other in the process of the government performance management evaluation. They need to follow the contractual agreement namely public value, which is created in the process of dialogue, negotiation and coordination between the government and the citizens. This is the "soft law" for the citizen participation in the local government performance evaluation.