Research On The Current Situation Of And Solutions To Citizen Participation In Public Policy-making

Formulated by the government or other policy-making organs, the public policy serves as a political action or the prescribed norms of conduct, which regulates the interests of the entire society and is characterized by distinctive goals and directions. It is a general reference to a series of regulations, decrees, measures, approaches and so on. Therefore, the public policy-making is closely linked with the citizen's interests. The citizen must participate in public policy-making, which is a guarantee to improve the quality of public policy-making. Citizen participation bears vital functions: it can further implement democratic beliefs, give free rein to collective wisdom in order to solve social problems, and make more citizens get to know the formulation and implementation of government policies. Collective participation and learning from each other's strengths to offset one's weaknesses can reduce malpractices in policy-making and selfish desires, affect the success or failure of the policy and promote the maturity of citizens themselves. It is thus clear that citizen participation is of decisive influence on public policy-making. Public administration is fundamental to the functions of the government in modern society so the government has to perfect itself and establish service-oriented governments in order to operate the public administration effectively. A service-oriented government requests that the government serve the citizen and focus on the citizen's interests in doing everything. Hence, when formulating a public policy, the government must heed public opinion, stimulate the citizen's interest of participation, create a participation-oriented atmosphere and encourage the citizen to engage in making the public policy. Currently, China has made some achievements in the practice of citizen participation in public policy-making, however, there still exist certain problems which entail the continual improvement of the government's functions. Moreover, that should also be a topic worth further discussion.The emergence of professor Denhardt's theory of new public service is based on the reflection on and criticism of the theory of new public administration, including the entrepreneur and government theory. In the ideological source and basic concept of Professor Denhardt's theory of new public service are the contemporary pioneering theories, mainly the theory of democratic civil rights, the theory of community and civil society, organizing humanism, new public administration and post-modern public administration.On the basis of macroscopic understanding and full use of the fruit of predecessors'study, and by comparing and analyzing literature and concrete evidence, the thesis makes a thorough discussion of the citizen participation in public policy-making. For this purpose, taking the transformation of the taxi model in Beijing as an example, and applying the theory of new public service, the thesis gives an elaborate analysis to the reason for the difficulty of Chinese citizen participation in public policy-making and also attempts to propose solutions to the perfection of Chinese citizen participation public policy-making.