Towards Effective And Sufficient Public Participation

With the introduction and promotion of governing the country by rule of law in China, the efforts of building a legal system with Chinese features attract much attention. In practice, the whole society has reached a consensus that legislation and rulemaking need to be drafted and reviewed in a democratic and scientific way. Under China's political framework, governments and its agencies at various levels have extensive and substantial power in rulemaking. The large amounts of rules exert substantial influence on economic development, social progress and citizens'rights and benefits. However, supervision over rulemaking within current political system is restricted in the executive branch, and most of them are aftermath ones. Thus, prior or timely public participation in rulemaking can help promote legitimacy and appropriateness of rules. In a decade, public participation in rulemaking has been carried out across the country, but problems arise such as oversimplification, going through a formality, imbalance and insufficiency.In this thesis, I, by employing methods in jurisprudentia and sociology of law, study the problems in the current system supply and practices of public participation in rulemaking, probe its causes, and then put forward suggestions.This thesis expounds the evolution of democratic theory and ladder of citizen participation, discusses the necessity and contemporary significance of public participation and defines relevant terms. Then comprehensive analyses are made about the current system supply, and detailed analyses are made about a local rule, namely Measures on Public Participation in Rulemaking in Guangzhou Municipality. After that, problems in practices are discussed with forms of public participation as a main thread. Main problems include incapacity of conducting participation on the government side, incapacity of the public side in participation and lacking of standardized forms in practices. The main reasons are restriction of current conditions and rulemaking mechanism, lack of regulations based on practices, insufficient open government information about rulemaking and imbalance of participation.Basing on previous studies, suggestions are put forward in three aspects, namely, capacity building and changing of mindset concerning public participation on the side of administrative organs; promoting standardized practices such as introduction of minimum participation requirement, emphasizing participation in review stage, standardizing roundtable discussion and promoting informal hearing; and doing basic work such as establishing an unified platform, strengthening government's capacity of information processing and promoting the active participation of the existing grassroots organizations.Public participation in rulemaking is an important way to expand direct democracy, also an effective way to make better regulations. It's a beneficial and necessary to supplement representative democracy. The promotion of sufficient and effective public participation is of great significance to the building of law-based government and a country of rule of law.