A Study On Responsible Government: Conception And System

The responsible government, functioned as a political concept and systematic deployment, represents both the correspondence and responsibility of the development of modern democracy to certain government. The power of the government is endowed by its people and simultaneously the homologous responsibility is also attributed to the government. The responsible government, which can be traced back to Britain cabinet system, achieves its representative mechanism by political responsibility system and thus secures electors'rights. Along with the expansion of administrative institutions and with the pervasion and interaction of legislative and judicial institutions, the responsibility mechanism of the responsible government has entered into public administration fields. The responsible government is an important embodied form of modern democracy and constitutionalism, signifies a crucial direction for which Chinese governmental reform heads, but also engenders different views and interpretation of scholars. Therefore this essay, by examining the conceptual development of the theory of the responsible government and pragmatic frameworks in various regimes, and by analyzing the responsibility process of the responsible government in the light of agency theory, attempts to clarify what the responsible government is and how it functions in different regimes, thus discovering the significance of the responsible government in relation to Chinese governmental reform and political-civilization construction.