The Study On Citizens' Satisfaction About Local Government's Services

As a tool of administration, government performance evaluation is given a great concern in the foreign public administrations. According to the statistics of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) , government performance evaluations have been implemented in Britain, Canada, Holland, New Zealand, France, Germany etc. since 1990s. China began to pay much more attention to this method recently. However, in large part of China, government performance evaluation remains at a very primitively low level because government performance evaluation advents late in China. Thus it is semi-spontaneous, blind, unilateral, passive, and, closed and mysterious. Especially when driven by the local interests, together with the pursuit of the local government officials' own political achievements, the economic indexes such as GDP and GDP growth become the major or even the only target to evaluate the performance of local governments. Yet, the facts prove that it is apparently so misleading to evaluate government performance according to GDP only, and the negative effects show off. What, except GDP, can scientifically reflect the ability of government administration? As the duty of a government is service but not control, the satisfaction of the local citizens should be used to evaluate the performance of a government. The Principle of Satisfaction is the overall standard in evaluation of government performance. And compare with China, western countries lead in this field by 20 years.Based on the conclusion of the relative designing methods and technical devices for the index system in foreign countries, the research, named Evaluation of China's Government Performance conducted by the Ministry of Personnel of China, brought out our own index system to evaluate the performance of local governments. It includes 3 first-classed indexes, such as the index of function, influence and potentials, 11 second-classed indexes and 33 third-classed ones. According to the result of that research and taking the reality of Wuhan city into consideration, the author designed a questionnaire on the satisfaction of Wuhan citizens with the government services. By using SPSS 11.5 and Microsoft Excel to analyze the sample data from the questionnaire, the author gains the status of the citizens' satisfaction with the government performance and learns the factors which make the comments from citizens prominent. After detailedexplanation to all the phenomena, the author gives her meliorative suggestions.The innovation in this thesis shows that the author applies the notion of satisfaction into the citizens' judgment of government performance. The author makes quantitative and qualitative analysis of government performance by using large amount of data and various methods, coupled with figures and illustrations to make the argument clearly presented. This research brings a new perspective for the evaluation of government performance.