The Legitimation And Legalization Of Policy Experiments

Policy experiment has played a very important role in the way of institutional innovation. Since the innovation and reform is lacking of experience, testing each step before taking it becomes its basic way. Therefore, the bottom-up policy experiment is almost dominant as a way of institutional innovation. Among those bottom-up policy experiments, those initiated by the public play a more crucial part because most policies originated from these experiments. However, policy experiments initiated by the public are not the only experiments.In this article, three policy experiments are classified:1) the one initiated by government; 2) the one jointly initiated by the government and the public; 3)the one initiated by the public. Both the first one and the third one are related to legalization and legitimation. In this article, both legitimation and legalization would be considered and they would be studied through the case of the Household Contract Responsibility System (HCRS). Legitimation is connected to the effectiveness of policy experiments and legalization means acceptance from government.In this article, effectiveness is believed to get based on two factors:1) the crises push the micro-units to take policy experiment for surviving; 2) the policy experiments are chosen by depending on the historical experiences. These two factors both happened in HCRS. Then facing such an effective policy experiment, it is the local government that firstly has to make a choice between the experiment and existing policies or institutions. In the matter of HCRS, local government holds necessary information and motivation to make a choice.1) compared with the central government and the public, the local governments master the latest and most accurate information about policy experiments and the existing policies; 2) local government is the level where three different interests intersect according to the structure of China’ politics system. In HCRS, local governments just act based on balancing these interests. Officials are the actual actors in local governments. Some of them are statesmen, some are policy experts and some are both statesmen and policy experts. Once the effectiveness of HCRS or other policy experiment is accepted by local governments, it would depend on these statesmen, policy experts or both to gasp the chance of reforming in institutions to legalize the policy experiments through their political sense of smell, negotiation strategies and enough investigations on these policy experiments beforehand. Besides, institution platform for policy making is important. The way of decision-making depends on this institution platform.