Origin Theory Perspectives Of China's Policy Agenda

The practices of public policy tell us that due to the restriction and influences of variousfactors, such as resources and capabilities, it is impossible for the government to make responsesto all the problems from the society in a certain period of time. Few parts of the problems thathave been noticed by decision-makers would form as policy output eventually. Therefore, as thelink process of changing the agglomerate interests into policy output, policy agenda plays animportant role in the process of policy. It can filter and screen all kinds of complex socialproblems in order to ensure the decision-makers to make positive responses to the importantproblems in theory and prevent the excessive information which can lead to the inefficient oreven invalid policy. Therefore, the investigation of the policy agenda is very important for theoptimization of the whole policy process.At present, though the study on the policy agenda has already formed some achievements inour country, it hasn’t been formed a complete theory system in academic circles. Most of theexisting research results are situation analysis about a specific question that goes into the policyagenda. But it doesn’t study or explain our country’s policy agenda from the macro level.Therefore, this paper applied and tried to make John W.Kingdon’s multiple-streams theory to bethe theoretical framework for analyzing the process of our country’s policy agenda.This paper is divided into four mainly parts.The first part introduces the fundamental theory of policy agenda. On one hand, itintroduces the relevant concepts about policy agenda and analyses the connotation, the mainbody and the function of it; On the other hand, it recommends Kingdon’s multiple-streams theoryand carries out valuation on the theory itself in order to make preparation for the followingcontents.In the second part, the multiple-streams theory is used to analyze our country’s policyagenda. In this section, the constitute elements of the three streams in our country’s policyagenda has been analyzed within the framework of Kingdon’s multiple-streams theory, and thenthrough applying the multiple-streams theory to the action of our policy, this article finds thatalthough the framework of John Kingdon’s multiple-streams theory can be used to analyze andexplain our country’s policy agenda in general，some differences such as political system and national structure between our country and the Western lead our policy agenda to show someunique characteristics on the problem stream , policy stream，political stream and the relationbetween the three streams.The third part is Case Analysis. In this section, by analyzing the process of the policyagenda about the adjustment of individual income tax in 2005, the applicability of themultiple-streams theory in practice of our country’s policy is verified and authenticated, and thensome problems and deficiencies in the problem stream, policy stream and political stream in thecourse of promoting the problem into policy agenda are concluded.The fourth part is on improvement strategy and thoughts proposed. It makesrecommendations about our country’s policy agenda on the basis of the third part, in order tomake our country’s policy agenda more scientific and effective. The contents of this partcontinue to use the framework of the multiple-streams theory and makes recommendations fromthe perspective of problem stream, policy stream and political stream as well as the policywindow. These measures mainly include focusing on the problem stream to identify policy issues,enriching policy stream to optimize the decision-making structure, creating a favorableatmosphere with the political forces and seizing the policy window to promote the coupling ofthe streams.