Citizen Participation In Local Government Performance Assessment

Improving government performance is always the goal of the government reform and pursuit, which thought to be achieving by means of the performance evaluation, and citizens are the significant subject of the evaluation. Since the 1970s, there has been a boom of government performance evaluation in western countries, and citizens'participation in performance evaluation comes to be the research focus. With the reform of administrative system advanced gradually, China began to gradually advance the importance of citizen participation in government performance evaluation, local governments initiate to explore the way for citizens'participation in the government performance evaluation. This paper intends to review what above referring, and ponders how to further advance the citizens'participation in order to provide some useful advices to promote this research.The first part of this paper defines the government performance evaluation, citizens'participation and other related concepts. There is no uniform definition about"citizen participation in local government performance evaluation"in domestic scholars. On the basis of synthesizing various authoritative views, this article defines it as"any individual or organization that receives the public products or services, makes evaluation or comments about the local government performance."The second part of the text analyses the necessity of citizen participation in local government performance evaluation in the perspective of theory and practice. Considered that citizens'participation, is the inevitable trend of integration of technical rationality and value rationality, is the inevitable request of the scientific concept of development, is the inexorable choice to local government perform their functions and build a service-oriented government, and is also the inevitable necessity for the evaluation subjects to promote the quality of evaluation.The third part reviews the current main forms of our citizens participate in local government performance evaluation, such as Hangzhou's"triumvirate"evaluation form, Nanjing's million people evaluation , Qingdao's three-dimensional evaluation and Gansu's the third party evaluation. The above mentioned models display the different characteristics in the process of practice.The fourth part analyses the problems about citizens'participation in local government performance evaluation. Mainly including: the related ?theory research and legal system construction lags behind the development of practice and demand; the phenomenon of local government-leading, citizens-passive participation presents in the process of practice; the specific deficiencies such as: the limited evaluation scope and link, the extensive related technical index are also in the process of citizen's evaluation; and the problems like lack of participated motives and abilities are existed as for citizen itself.The fifth part puts some suggestions on promoting for citizens'participation in local government performance evaluation on the basis of above analysis. It considered that we should strengthen the theory research, consummate the legal system, improve the practice conception of local government about citizens participating in performance evaluation, expand the scope of citizens'participation, perfect the technology of citizens'participation, strengthen the motivation of citizens'participation, improve the ability of citizens'participation.