Study Of County Level Civil Servants’ Representation

With the increase of their democratic consciousness, more and more Chinese citizens express their interest demand through media, the internet and other channels, in hope of governments’responses. As the electoral democracy in China is not developed well at present, democratic administration system should be built during the administrative reform so as to accommodate the development of the society. In the process of this reform, it will be meaningful to establish a representative bureaucracy. It can not only improve governments’representativeness and responsiveness, but also promote social equity. Representative bureaucracy indicates every social element should have its representatives in civil servant group, which promote social equity. As every social element can express its opinions through its representatives in bureaucracy and their opinions can be reflected in the process of policy making and performing, people’s interests can be well protected and governments’responsiveness can be increased. A key part of representative bureaucracy is the realization of active representation, which means a civil servant of passive representation should support the interest demand of the social element he or she represents. Only if we learn the degree of civil servants’active representation and its functional mechanism, can we understand how to effectively construct representative bureaucracy. This study firstly demonstrates the applicability in China’s context of the theory of representative bureaucracy in the method of document analysis, and then it studies the active representation of civil servants by investigating their policy preference in the method of questionnaire. The questionnaire is about policy preference of gender, age, race and social class. And it is conduct among civil servants of three county level governments respectively from eastern, central and western China. Results of this study show that active representation of age is very strong, that of race and gender come second; while the attitudes towards policies that benefit low income groups of civil servants of different social class show no significant difference. Besides, civil servants of higher level prefer to represent the interests of minority group; civil servants who received higher degree of education or worked longer in public sectors more often refuse to accept their role as representatives; political status of civil servants shows no significant influence on their active representation; civil servants with higher representative bureaucracy perception always accept their role as representatives.This thesis consists of six parts. The first part mainly introduces the background and purpose of this thesis, main content, and research review and research method. The second part clarifies the significance of the study of active representation by analyzing the applicability of the representative bureaucracy in China’s context. The third part introduces the design of the empirical part in this study. The fourth part is the empirical part of this study, which analyses the civil servants’ policy preference with the questionnaire data and verifies study hypothesis. The fifth part proposes some suggestions of improving active representation basing on the discussion of research findings. The sixth part is the epilogue which explains the deficiencies in this study and expresses the author’s expectation for future studies.