The Study On The Roles Of Mircoblog’s Participation In Public Policy Making

Nowadays, it is of greater importance to have Chinese citizens participatingin public policy making, as we are facing increasingly diversified interest groups,severe social contradictions and an increasing awareness of citizenship. Todevelop a harmonious society, it is necessary for the public to participate inpolicy making process to ensure those policies are made in a legal, scientific anddemocratic way. With the rapid development of modern informationtechnologies, Internet has opened up a new channel for the government and itscitizens to communicate and interact in various ways with regard to decisionmakings. The show up of microblog further intensifies the roles internet plays inmodern governance. By providing a platform for free comments, microblogenables people to express their opinions through the way of “@”, whenever andwherever they want to. It has thus become an effective way for Chinese citizensto participate in public policy making. This paper, taking the Sina-microblog asan example, tries to probe into the significance and limitations of participationvia microblog in public policy making in the new era, by applying relevant theories such as theories of participation democracy, good governance, agendasetting and etc.. Efforts are made to analyze how microblog interacts with publicpolicy making, how it functions, and how to optimize it.This paper analyzes the subjects of microblog participation from theperspective of the microblog group composition, which includes the microblogof government, traditional mass Medias, celebrities (Opinion leaders) andordinary users. In addition, this paper also analyzes the driving force of themicroblog participation in the public policy making from the perspectives ofactive and passive roles of microblog. Based on two case studies:“saving thechildren beggar by taking pictures conveniently” and “school bus accident ofkindergarten in Gansu province”, the paper analyzes the significance andlimitations of participation via microblog in public policy makings and tries tomake suggestions on its optimization. This study believes that microblogprovides a platform for the communications between citizens and thegovernment, promoting the transform of the social problems into public issues.Through escorting public issues into the agenda of public policy making,microblog participations are able to enhance the democracy and scientificfidelity of the government’s decision makings, as well as promoting the revisionof present policies and the quality of local governances. It goes without sayingthat microblog participation in the public policy making is still defective asmicroblog participation is still afflicted by some disadvantages, such as theimperfectness of public opinion expressed in the microblog, fake information and disorder spread of such fake information and other limitations such as innerfactors of elite tendencies and etc., external factors related to the environmentsuch as the manipulation of the ruling party and the citizens’ weak awareness ofmicroblog participation and so on and so forth. Through actively promoting thepositive driving roles of the participants, we should institutionalize themicroblog participation, maximizing the positive significance of microblogparticipation by improving the technical platform of the microblog participationso as to enhance the scientific fidelity, democracy and legalization levels ofpublic policies.