Study On Effectiveness Of Citizen Participation In Performance Evaluation Of The Local Government Of China

Citizen participation has a rich connotation with diverse manifestations and ways. In a democratic society, the legitimacy of governance is based on popular will by means of citizen participation. Through various types of governance, people could express different individual-preference, interest and to gain knowledge of communication and compromise. Broad sense of citizen participation should be involved in the political process, the legislative process and the administrative process, and the performance evaluation of local government is an administrative process.Citizen participation has been widely used in performance evaluation of local government in Euramerican developed countries. Based on understanding the public administration work of the local government in a period of time, the citizen can judge the performance indicators and made proposals for it’s potential problems to improve evaluation’s legitimate, reasonable and scientific. Through this mode, the citizen can influence the decisions made by the local government based on the results of the evaluation and to raise it’s public credibility, administrative efficiency and it’s ability of the public service in some extent.In China, citizen participation in performance evaluation of local government started relatively late. Up to now, even it has made some effects, it still exists problems such as mechanism missing, disordered participation and accountability missing, which seriously affect the effectiveness of the citizen participation. This paper is to be a research that aimed at improving the validity of citizen participation in performance evaluation of local government, the statements will be started from the following three main aspects. First of all, the2nd chapter gave an integrated overview on related literature that introduces the research actuality in Euramerican developed countries, then compared it with domestic research on the main characteristics and the basic method.Second again, the3rd chapter summarized the current situation about performance evaluation of local government in China from six aspects:the organizer, the evaluator, the evaluation object, the forms of participation, the evaluation content and the results of participation. On this basis, the4th chapter discussed the factors and assessment indicators that influence the effectiveness of citizen participation so that we can assess and score the effectiveness of "2012Netizens Evaluate the government" in M County by using analytic hierarchy process. According to current situation in chapter3and the scores in last chapter, we found the three core issues which led to a poor effectiveness in performance evaluation of local government:the lack of security mechanism, the unordered process and the lack of accountability mechanism, and the key reasons are the public opinion environment, the channel and the legal system.Last, ten measures of how to raise the effectiveness were put forward from two aspects:the structure of governance and institutional reforms for the top-level and the implementation mechanism.