Study On The Effectiveness And Its Influencing Factors Of Urban Community Consultative Governance

Urban community consultative governance,as an innovative practice of consultative democracy embedded in urban community governance,is an essential part of the construction of modern grass-roots governance system and the modernization of grass-roots governance.The urban community governance driven by consultative democracy advocates a diversified,equal and conversational consultative governance mechanism to promote good community governance,the essence of which is that multiple entities achieve public interests and values through rational communication and collaborative cooperation.Existing studies often assume that consultation is an effective governance mechanism for urban communities,and actively explore theoretical issues such as the premise,basis and approach of transforming the advantages of deliberative democracy into governance effectiveness.Although the issue of “consultation failure” has attracted academic attention,most studies have not yet demonstrated the effectiveness of urban community consultation governance as an independent research issue.Based on the “effectiveness” of urban community consultative governance,this paper takes the theory of consultative democracy,network governance and public value as the theoretical basis,and further asks what is the effectiveness of urban community consultative governance? How to evaluate the effectiveness of urban community consultative governance? What factors affect the effectiveness of urban community consultative governance? How to improve the effectiveness of urban community consultative governance? In order to provide useful reference for the high quality development of urban community consultation governance.The establishment of an evaluation index system is a prerequisite for accurately locating the differences in the effectiveness of consultative governance in different urban communities.Taking the theory of public value as the entry point,combined with the theory of consultative democracy and the theory of networked governance,this paper explores the evaluation index system of the effectiveness of urban community consultative governance.Using the exploratory qualitative research method of grounded theory,open coding,axial coding and selective coding are carried out on the typical urban community consultation governance cases in the National Experimental Area of Community Governance and National Excellent Community Work Method,so as to form the premise of“subject effectiveness”,the guarantee of “process effectiveness” and the goal of“result effectiveness”.Based on the three-dimensional perspective of “governance subject-governance process-governance result”,a comprehensive,whole-process and systematic evaluation model of the effectiveness of urban community consultation governance is constructed.In accordance with the general principles of scientificity,systematization,feasibility and comparability and the special principles of subject coordination,whole process and quality orientation,combined with the results of grounded theories and review of the existing literature,a preliminary design of urban community consultative governance effectiveness evaluation system containing 38 indicators.Delphi method and analytic hierarchy process were used to empirically screen the evaluation indicators and assign weights to them.Finally,an evaluation index system for the effectiveness of urban community consultative governance was constructed,including 3 dimensional indicators,9 basic indicators and 32 specific indicators.The ultimate goal of constructing index system is to respond to practice.In this paper,Chengdu City is selected as the research site,and residents from 5districts,11 subdistricts and 50 urban communities in Chengdu are surveyed by simple random sampling and stratified sampling methods.Finally,1025 valid questionnaires are collected,and on this basis,empirical analysis is conducted on the effectiveness of urban community consultation governance.From the measurement results,the effectiveness of urban community consultative governance in Chengdu is in the “good” level,in which the result effectiveness >subject effectiveness > process effectiveness,and the process effectiveness is only the “qualified” level,indicating that there is a “process effectiveness depression”in urban community consultative governance.From the perspective of “fractal dimension” analysis,the indexes of Party building leadership,autonomous organization leadership,social coordination and public participation under the subject effectiveness dimension are respectively at the level of “excellent”,“qualified”,“good” and “good”,indicating that urban communities have basically formed a consultative governance system under the leadership of Party organizations and multi-party participation.However,there are still problems such as weak autonomy,weak social coordination and insufficient public participation.Procedure specification and interaction quality index under the dimension of process effectiveness are at the level of “good” and “qualified” respectively,indicating that high-quality interaction of multiple consultation subjects has a long way to go.The index of social order,service quality and consultation institutionalization under the dimension of result effectiveness were all "good",but the level of consultation governance institutionalization was relatively lagging.From the comparison of “sub-types”,urban communities of different spatial types,scale types and income types have different degrees of differences in the effectiveness of consultation governance.Among them,commercial housing communities,medium-sized communities and middle-income communities have relatively high effectiveness of consultative governance,indicating that the effectiveness of urban community consultative governance is obviously unbalanced in different communities.Based on the strategic triangle model of public value management and combined with the characteristics of urban community consultative governance in terms of value objectives,empowering environment and operational ability,an analytical framework of factors affecting the effectiveness of urban community consultative governance is formed.Through multiple linear regression analysis and robustness testing,this study found that community economic level,community social capital,consultation cultural atmosphere,consultation system identification,community smart governance,and community public space have significant impacts on the effectiveness of urban community consultative governance.However,the effects of community economic level,community smart governance and community public space on the process effectiveness of urban community consultative governance failed to pass the significance test.Heterogeneity analysis showed that community economic level significantly affected the effectiveness of consultative governance in medium-sized and middle-income communities;the influence of community social capital on the effectiveness of consultative governance is more prominent in the village to community;Consultative institutional identity has a positive effect on other spatial types as well as communities of different sizes and income types,except for the old neighborhood community and the village to community;Community smart governance has a significant impact on the effectiveness of consultative governance in medium and large communities;The impact of community public space on the effectiveness of consultative governance in low-income communities and village to communities has not passed significant test.Heterogeneity analysis results provide more empirical data support for improving the effectiveness of urban community consultative governance with precision and refinement.Based on the above findings,the paper further proposes policy suggestions to promote the effectiveness of urban community consultative governance.First,develop “community economy” to strengthen the economic foundation of community consultation,promote the intensive development of community industry,strengthen regional party building and integrate community resources;Second,enhance “social capital” to build trust foundation for community consultation,construct harmonious modern neighborhood relations,integrate community emotional governance resources,and develop community voluntary service;Third,cultivate the “consultation culture” to strengthen the democratic atmosphere of community consultation,create a cultural atmosphere of consultation autonomy,improve the public’s consultation awareness and consultation ability,and cultivate the public rationality of the consultation subjects.Fourth,Strengthen the “institutional identity” to promote the deep embedment of community consultation,change the concept of community governance,build a diverse community governance mechanism,and strengthen the institutionalization of community consultation;Fifth,promote “smart governance” to deepen the technical empowerment of community consultation,improve new community infrastructure,accelerate the construction of smart communities,and promote smart community governance guided by public value;Sixth,create “public space”to expand the space carrier of community consultation,reconstruct the publicity of community public space,improve the accessibility of community public space,and optimize the versatility of community public space.The innovation of this paper lies in the following aspects: first,examining urban community consultative governance from the perspective of “effectiveness”,exploring the degree to which the advantages of democratic consultation system are transformed into governance effectiveness,and focusing on how the democratic consultation mechanism is effectively embedded into urban community governance,which makes up for the deficiency of attaching importance to “grand theory” while ignoring “micro narration”.Second,constructing an evaluation system for the effectiveness of urban community consultation governance from the “subject-process-result” dimension,focusing on the whole process of urban community consultation governance,avoiding the deficiencies of single result-oriented or single process-oriented evaluation,and responding to the strategic requirements of developing the whole process of people’s democracy in the new era.Third,revealing the influencing factors of the effectiveness of urban community consultation governance from the perspective of“community differentiation”,not only focusing on the “commonness” of urban community consultation governance,but also pays attention to the “personality” of different types of urban community,and systematically interpreting the influencing factors of the effectiveness of community consultation governance in different spatial types,scale types and income types.Future research can focus on dynamic adjustment of the indicator system,in-depth exploration of influencing factors,and expansion of diverse analysis units,so as to deepen research topics in the effectiveness of urban community consultative governance,and provide theoretical support for high-quality development of urban community consultative governance.