The Mechanism And Effect Of Governance By Ranking

Ranking is a common governance tool of Chinese government.A review of its application history reveals that,as a governance tool,"ranking" in China has transcended the time,space and field of national governance and become an indispensable governance tool with Chinese characteristics.At present,the modernization of China's national governance system and governance capacity is confronted with two challenges,which lie in the change of governance objects and the renewal of governance measures.Governance objects have strong feature of the times,while governance tool updates are more path-dependent than governance object changes.Governance tools are the result of adapting to a certain level of development and power structure,and are the embodiment of the political,economic,scientific,cultural and social factors of a certain time.In the context of rapid economic development and little fundamental change in the power structure,governance tools must be re-assessed and adjusted to keep pace with the changing governance objects.The essential problematic concerns of this study are the mechanism and the effect of Governance by Ranking in the context of China' s national governance.The research takes the ranking in the context of China's national governance as the object of the study and aims to explore its mechanism and effect,so as to clarify the significance and value that ranking has as a governance tool.Under the positivist interpretation framework,the core research question can be interpreted from three research objectives.The first one is combing the practical and theoretical knowledge and constructing a conceptual foundation.The second one is summarizing the implementation mechanism based on the case event process chain.The third one is conducting Agent-Based Modeling&Simulation&Verification.The first research objective refers to literature review and the construction of analytical framework,while the latter two objectives refer to empirical analysis.Literature review reveals that ranking has a long history and rich contemporary practice in China's national governance,as well as a profound interdisciplinary theoretical foundation.Natively,it originates from the practice of classifying administrative regions at the same level and performance evaluation for local governors in imperial period.Such management methods continue to this day with the inheritance of systems and culture.They have been applied in key fields at all stages of the construction of socialism with Chinese characteristics,and have been reformed with the import of Western management methods after the Reform and Opening-up.Scholars from various fields have carried out research on ranking from different disciplinary assumptions.Economists proposed a "tournament model" within the framework of the rational choice model,and it was used by political scientists to explain China's economic miracle.With the expansion of theoretical boundaries,this model has been extended to other public management fields such as environmental protection.System science puts forward a complete methodological assumption for the macro emergence of individual behavior under the local rules of rewards and punishments.The review of theoretical and practical accumulation reveals that "ranking" is essentially a governance tool adapted to the specific power structure and governance situation in China.Governance by Ranking has deeply involved in the construction of horizontal and vertical government relationship of China and surpassed the Relative Performance Evaluation that emphasizes technical rationality,and has become an important part of national governance.Ranking has the function of incentive and information collection.As a top-down governance tool,the intervention of superior government can in turn activate the functions of information aggregation,decision support,social supervision,performance evaluation,resource allocation and official selection.According to the incentive structure,Governance by Ranking can be divided into two forms,which are rewarding ranking and punitive ranking.The boundary conditions are determined by the urgency and uncertainty of governance issues.The non-incentive ranking is suitable for the governance scenario with low uncertainty and urgency.While the rewarding ranking is suitable for the situation with high uncertainty and low urgency,and the punitive ranking is suitable for the situation with low uncertainty and high urgency.When the uncertainty and urgency of the governance tasks are relatively high,reward and punishment should be adopted at the same time.Focusing on functions and incentive structure,the empirical analysis studies the implementation mechanism and effect of ranking respectively.This study comprehensively deconstructs and reconstructs the governance phenomenon of ranking by using both qualitative method and quantitative method.Among them,the qualitative research method includes text analysis,and the quantitative research methods refers to Agent-based Modeling method and econometric method.With the method of text analysis,this study takes air pollution control as an example and establish the mechanism of Governance by Ranking.Based on the defined.mechanism,this study extends further to design the agent-based model and the econometric model,in order to test the incentive effect of ranking.The mechanism of Governance by Ranking is conceptualized on the basis of 215 relevant documents of environmental performance ranking policies adopted by governments at various levels throughout the country.The mechanism consists of the background,basic principles,components and operation process.The ranking policies studied in this research mainly refers to the urban air quality ranking policy introduced into the field of air pollution control since 2013 with the promulgation and implementation of the Action Plan of Air Pollution Prevention and Control.The establishment of the ranking system starts with the monitoring system and indicators,and then the superior government divides the governance task to subordinate governments of the target areas.By using measures such as reputation mechanism,financial incentive and administrative punishment,the superior government can periodically stimulate the subordinate to improve the performance.Through paths of"mastering information,allocating resources" and "releasing information,mobilizing subordinates",the superior government achieves the purpose of improving the overall performance.After exploring the mechanism and instrumental nature of Governance by Ranking,this study creatively solves two intractable problems by employing the method of agent-based modeling.One problem is that the variable of ranking is not independent among individual agents;the other is the expression difficulty of dynamic mechanism.Based on actual ranking policies,this study takes air pollution control as an example and sets up three exogenous rules and two endogenous rules with 26 variables,so as to establish the model.Through dynamic simulation,the differences of systematic effects under different endowment conditions and incentive structures are analyzed.The simulation results show that the effect of reward only lasts a short time,while the effect of punishment is more obvious and more fundamental.If taking both reward and punishment measures,the characteristics of both incentive structures will be presented.At the same time,it reveals that the improvement of overall performance brought by the reward mainly depends on the improvement of leading subjects,namely the star effect.The improvement of the overall performance caused by punishment mainly depends on the improvement of subjects at the bottom of the ranking,which is the circular-improvement effect.After simulation,this study verifies the mechanism with regression discontinuity design based on the case of Air Quality Ranking Policy of Shandong province.The results of econometrics empirical study verify the circular-improvement effect,but the star effect is not verified.Such a result may due to the policy background and the attribute of air quality indicators.This study found that Governance by Ranking is essentially a governance tool in a bureaucratic structure.The superior starts with the establishment of information collection system and indicators,and ranks the indicators periodically to collect information and motivate the subordinates so as to improve the performance within a certain range.In the context of national governance in China,Governance by Ranking plays a role of top-down unbalanced incentive mechanism.It conforms to the basic hypothesis of promotion tournament and brings various forms of local governmental competition into the unified framework.The mechanism of reward and punishment based on ranking can be used to realize the emergence of individual behavior to macro-governance effect.In the profound background of the modernization of national governance,it can be adopted to avoid the phenomenon of "race to the bottom" in some regulatory fields.In addition,the incentive ranking can encourage the subordinate units to innovate actively to overcome the high uncertainty governance task.Punitive ranking can exert the effect of policy pressure and promote the implementation of top-down policies.This research has made innovations in the aspects of theoretical and practical summary,multidisciplinary foundation integration and specific domain knowledge accumulation.The practical knowledge scattered in multiple public management fields and the research in different disciplines are integrated under the framework of Governance by Ranking and applied in the context of environmental governance.On the basis of breaking through the general obstacles in the study of governance tools,a theoretical framework is eventually formed to provide both scientific and practical knowledge of public management.In the sense of scientific knowledge,Governance by Ranking integrates existing theories and practices,defines a governance instrument based on inter-hierarchical government relations,and provides a holistic interpretation framework for existing competition models.In terms of practical knowledge,Governance by Ranking provides an instrument to motivate subordinates to achieve governance goals and provides standardized operational suggestions for the application of ranking in practice.In this study,Governance by Ranking was constructed as a governance tool,and its mechanism and effects were explored in the context of air pollution governance,but its limitations and inter-domain spillover effects were still insufficient.However,discussions on the limitations of this instrument and the interaction effect between ranking systems remain inadequacy.Due to the limitation of the index nature of background cases,the "star effect" has not been verified under the econometrics test.Future research will introduce the concept of Governance by Ranking into more fields of economic and social construction,conduct research on the interaction effects of multiple ranking systems,and extend the research perspective to different periods of socialist construction with Chinese characteristics,thus bringing more inspirations to the theoretical interpretation and practical application of the modernization governance in China.