Social Capital, Citizen Participation And Government Governance

With the development of economic globalization and political democratization, many countries'governments all over the world have carried out governance reform, government governance has become one of the core issues among all related debates. Fundamentally, this paper first analyzed the basic theory in order to define the concept on social capital. Furthermore, citizen participation was regarded as the core content of government governance, this paper analyzed the function of citizen participation in reducing transaction cost in government governance, and discussed the social capital issue in citizen participation. Within the basic research concept, this paper selected "Comprehensive Evaluation System", "Facilitating People's Livelihood by Democracy" and "Opening Decision-making" as the typical cases of Hangzhou in government governance, analyzed the basic characteristics of "Hangzhou Model" in local government governance and discussed the function of local government in cultivating social capital. Finally, the basic conclusion and the future research directions have been proposed.The research conclusions are the following:As one the capital elements, social capital exists in group interaction and the whole social structure, which includes trust, norm and network. Social capital possesses the attribution of public goods, it's the efficiency basis of government governance, and the government governance is also the process of creating social capital. As a kind of behavior mechanism, citizen participation is the intermediary factors of social capital's influence on the government governance. The establishment of citizen participation depends on the accumulation of social capital, it improves the performance of government governance by reducing transaction cost. "Hangzhou Model" is the typical case of local government governance in China, whose basic characteristic is implementing citizen direction in public affairs, promoting the interaction between government and society, and creating social capital.The main innovative points in this research are:(1) Introducing the analytic paradigm of social capital theory into the government governance research field. It studied the characteristics of government governance and the internal relationship between social capital and government governance through the perspective of social capital theory. (2) According to the research logic of "Institution-Behavior Performance", the basic theoretical framework of "Social capital-Citizen participation-Government governance" has been established. It analyzed the function of citizen participation in reducing transaction cost in government governance, and the internal logic between citizen participation mechanism and social capital. (3) Based on the theoretical framework, it makes a thorough analysis of Hangzhou's practice in government governance. This research has revealed the function of social capital and citizen participation in government governance, which is helpful to promote the research on current local government governance.