Research On The Local Government Quality Influence Of The Residents Subjective Well-being

As an important element of the national administration, local government is the government agency who provides public services directly for its residents. Local governance deeply affects a country’s overall political, economic and social development through implementation of policies, public services, local administrative management, local economy development, public infrastructure, residents’ participation, etc. The so-called “quality of government”, refers to the character of government, is a comprehensive evaluation on what the government should do and how is the government’s performance. Specifically, quality of government involves a variety of issues such as the rationality of government func tions, the scientific feature of government’s behavior and the efficiency of government’s output. This paper is based on local government theory and theory of modern governance, which proves that quality of government refers to its own status, administrative capacity and the level of democracy in the process of implementation of policies in a given period. Q uality of government also means its performance in meeting people’s needs and achieving public recognition through its administrative governance, market governance and social governance. Quality of government can be measured through quality of local government size, quality of local government capacity, quality of governance by law, quality of local government democracy, quality of local government credibility. Subjective Well- Being(SWB) can be an effect measurement of people’s living condition in a particular region. SWB reflects people’s recognition and satisfaction of their living condition and participation in politics, and SWB is also an important indicator which is local government’s critical focus area. Continuing high development of people’s SWB is an important manifestation of development of civil society, as well as a fundamental goal which local government pursues in the process of modern governance. Historically, politics dominates the well-being of members of the society, in other words, whether a member of the society feels happy or not, majorly depends on politics, and there is a direct correlation between people’s happiness and the politics.This paper builds a systematic evaluation model of quality of local government through literature review and some related theories. The evaluation model contains indicators such as government size, government capacity, the level of democracy and governance by law, government credibility, etc. Therefore, this model carries out a real measurement of quality of local government and proves the applicability and scientific quality of the model from the 82 samples of local government. Subsequently, this paper verifies the extent of local government affect the well-being of citizens empirically after full consideration of the potential micro and macroeconomic interference factors of residents’ subjective well-being, with powerful data from the CGSS 2010 database. After evaluating the influence coefficients and dimension influence coefficients between quality of local government and residents’ subjective well-being, this paper proposes optimization approach to improve people’s well-being significantly from the perspective of modern governance. The first two chapters of this paper are overall introduction and literature review of this paper. The third chapter proposes the hypothesis and builds the evaluating model of quality of local government from the local government theory and modern governance theory. The fourth and fifth chapter are the empirical parts, these parts organize both the objective data and the subjective data, then conclude with a final indicator of quality of local government and rank the 82 sample cities by the indicator of quality of local government, after that, these parts run an ordinal regression on residents’ subjective well-being and draw out the influence coefficients and the significance level. The sixth chapter further illustrates the empirical results and proposes an optimization approach to improve residents’ subjective well-being significantly from the perspective of modern governance. C hapter seven serves as summary and outlook of this paper. In the empirical parts, the paper obtains 11,785 individual residents samples from CGSS database. After organizing the incorrect and missing samples, 7716 effective samples are chosen to run an ordinal regression and draw on the effect of quality of local government on residents’ subjective well-being. The empirical parts confirmed the previous hypothesis in this paper, that is, quality of local government affects residents’ subjective well-being significantly, and quality of local government size, quality of local government capacity, quality of governance by law, quality of local government democracy, quality of local government credibility also affect residents’ subjective well-being on different significance levels. After regional and group sample study, this paper draws more detailed conclusion: the influence of quality of local government on residents’ subjective well-being are more significant in middle area and west area of C hina and in non-urban population. Therefore, this paper clarifies the key areas and key populations in promoting residents’ subjective well-being by local government.Innovation of this paper mainly reflects on the novelty, and cutting-edge topic and the research framework of this paper. As research on quality of local government and residents’ subjective well-being is still in its infancy, many scholars mainly focus on issues such as corruption and residents’ subjective well-being, democracy and residents’ subjective well-being; they ignore the influence of quality of local government which plays a major part in modern governance on residents’ subjective well-being. This paper selects the local government as research object and selects theory of local government and theory of modern governance as guidance, then uses residents’ subjective well-being as key evaluating factor for quality of local government and uses promoting residents’ subjective well-being as guidance of local government behavior. Innovation of this paper is mainly reflected in: Firstly, the paper focuses on quality of local government and residents’ subjective well-being, which is a hot issue. After summarizing related literature, this paper build an evaluating model of quality of government, quality of local government size, quality of local government capacity, quality of governance by law, quality of local government democracy and quality of local government credibility, then analyses the influence of quality of government on residents’ subjective well-being from scientific data research, and draw an optimization approach to improve residents’ subjective well-being. Secondly, as a research on quality of local government and residents’ subjective well-being, based on theory of modern governance and literature review, this paper build an systematic evaluating model on quality of local government. This broadens research on such fields as, evaluation on quality of local government and residents’ subjective well-being, etc. From local government theory and theory of modern governance, this paper analyses the mechanism between quality of local government and residents’ subjective well-being and proposes related hypothesis. In the empirical parts, this paper gives different weights on different indicators and takes quality of different sample cities and some control factors into account, then analyses different indicators of quality of government and their influence on residents’ subjective well-being, separate samples from region perspective and urban and rural perspective, and draws empirical results after full consideration of the potential micro and macroeconomic interference factors of residents’ subjective well-being. Thirdly, the paper first introduces theory of residents’ subjective well-being index into practice, conducts normative research, empirical research and comparative research, and makes use of methods s uch as literature collection, questionnaire, principal component analysis and ordinal regression. First builds an evaluating model on quality of government, and then discusses influence of quality of government on residents’ subjective well-being. Through designing and discussing the empirical model, this paper draws an objective and credible results after analyzing 82 sample cities. And thus, based on analysis of an optimization approach for local government to improve residents’ subjective well-being, this paper provides certain functions for academic study and policy guidance.