Participatory Budget And Effectiveness Of Deliberative Democracy

Since the 1980 s, Joseph Bessette put forward the concept of "Deliberative Democracy" first, with the Liberal Democracy exposed many problems in practice, the concept has won a lot of attention and become an ideal scheme in people’s minds. Deliberative democracy takes the equal participation, the expression of preference, the conversion of preference, the legitimate decision serious. In contemporary political discourse, legitimacy and effectiveness is like two sides of the same coin, but the study of effectiveness is still rare, rarely get to discuss the effectiveness of the deliberative democracy, its performance is less talk about. In the attention of deliberative democracy and its practice, our eyes will be attracted by Wenling--a county-level city of Zhejiang Province, use the platform of democratic talkfest, exploration of deliberative democracy at the grass-roots level for many years, has obtained the good effect of system and society. Later, local government officials based on the experience of the foreign participatory budget, in some towns conducted participatory budget experiment for ten years, also has achieved fruitful results and become a model of local grass-roots political reform.On the one hand the research of effectiveness of deliberative democracy is rarely, on the other is the continued operation of grassroots participatory budget, there should be an important relationship between this but has not been noticed by academic mainstream, this paper attempts to explore this question. The paper thinks that the effectiveness of the deliberative democracy refers to the positive characteristics of deliberative democracy in the show to meet people’s needs and realize its objective aspect. Effectiveness of deliberative democracy mainly reflected in two aspects of concept and material. To sum up, the effectiveness of the deliberative democracy at the grass-roots level performance mainly exists in three aspects: political, economic, and cultural level.Political level mainly from two dimensions to study: decision making and participation, and decision dimensions to measure from three aspects: transparency, scientific and legitimacy. Participation can use the breadth and depth to measure. The economic level can be observed from the two dimensions of the income and expenditure. Cultural aspects are available from the government, citizen, democratic atmosphere in three dimensions to analyze.Participatory budget in Wenling although played a good effect, but it still exist certain limits in theory and reality. The limit of theory mainly has the following performance: difficult to reach a consensus, the government is reluctant to share power, citizen can not promote participatory budget system that is dominated by the administrative logic. Practical level, the participatory budget is faced more limits, it can be divided into three categories: the first is the limitations of government level, the second is the limitation on the level of citizens, the third class is limited on the level of social organization, namely social group’s participation in the participatory budget is very low.The existence of limitations and disadvantages from another aspect to understand is the existence of room for improvement. Since the system encourage citizens to use three steps involved in helping the democratization, the public, the participatory budget practice that existed in four layers for improvement, participation, preparation, auditing, supervision. There is room for improvement, the route of improving also existed, in general, can be implemented from the following four aspects: first, consummates the operation technology, promote the reform of the technical, second is to expand participation of transparency and universality, third is to reform the system of National People’s Congress, strengthen the power of NPC member, forth is to play a role of experts reasonable.Possessing the participatory budget after ten years of development, established a good political, economic and cultural performance. Observed from the national level, the participatory budget presents some positive trends: first, the practice shows the tendency of expanding into the upper; second, expanding the rights of citizens and NPC members; third, the budget is becoming more and more public.The relationship between governance strategy and governance technology is a topic worthy of long-term study, this paper did very shallow attempt only, looking forward to the next step will be able to have more research results. Deliberative democracy at the grass-roots level in essence is a kind of grassroots governance model, but it is on a guiding, macroscopic and strategic level, participatory budget is on a operational, microcosmic, technology level. Namely, deliberative democracy is essentially a kind of governance strategy, and participatory budget is essentially a kind of governance technology. In order to improve and develop the socialism with Chinese characteristics and promote the national governance system and management ability of modernization, we should not pay attention to governance strategy only, attention should also be paid to the governance technology, such a major transformation happens over a period of time and involves a series of essential steps.