Research On Micro-Blog’s Impact On Public Policy

Citizen participation is one of the important parts in the whole process of public policy. Micro-blog has become an important way of citizen participation in public policy, since it became widely available in China from2009.By micro-blog, the public not only obtain information, understand the society, and communicate with each other, but also express opinions on various social phenomena and problems, discuss public affairs, participate in social life, and supervise the government. In this background, to research micro-blog influence on public policy is particularly important.Aiming at micro-blog participation in public policy making, with the theory of citizen participation, good governance theory, and new public service theory, this article combines with the current issues to analyze micro-blog’s influential ways on each link of public policy: in the process of public policy agenda setting, by means of "network focal event" and "Representatives’ proposals", micro-blog reflects and warms social problems to be urgently solved, and promotes social problems into policy problems as soon as possible; in the policymaking process, the government makes decisions relying on "public opinions", the public influence policy planning by micro-blog; in the process of policy implementation, micro-blog takes "multiple actors’ cooperation" as basis, and promotes the policy implementation, by means of integrating multiple actors, such as netizen, government, social celebrity, non-profit organization and the media; during the policy evaluation, the government amends policy at the basis of "public opinions’ feedback", to ensure that the policy is scientific and reasonable.Micro-blog can make the public demands into public pressure, and then affect the public policy formulation, implementation and evaluation process, mainly through cooperation with public opinion multiplication, interaction, integration and other mechanisms, thereby takes affect.However, there are still many obstacles in micro-blog exerting influence on the public policy process: false information flooding, water armies’ instruction, personal information leakage,etc. These factors lead micro-blog difficult to function effectively in policy-making.To understand micro-blog public opinion correctly, government should not only avoid the negative factors, but also further explore the optimal path, in order to maximize micro-blog’s positive effect. This article proposes feasible advices to perfect micro-blog influence on public policy, from consciousness, technology, law, system etc.