Building Government Credibility In The Internet Age

The coming age of internet has influenced government’s traditional ruling mode and concept, and shook governors’ inborn ideas of ruling power legalization. In the free, open and interactive internet age, internet society plays an important role in monitoring the government credibility. Through the internet platform, the public has the power to counter-balance the unreasonable policies from the government, thus, government administrating and ruling behavior would be determined by the process of discussion and balance among multi social classes instead of government one-dimensional decision. However, the orderly maintenance of government credibility has encountered unprecedented opportunities and challenges. On the one hand, the complexity, difficulty in controlling, changeability and sensibility of internet society has resulted in mixed responses to the government reputation and credibility, which poses difficulty in promoting government credibility. On the other hand, internet has provided rich resources and convenient platform for the public, which would be helpful for effective and active construction of government credibility. Based on the characteristics of the rapid development of internet, this paper focuses on the case of "restriction on cars purchasing in Shenzhen" occurred in 2014 from the perspective of the generation of government credibility. This paper is aimed to study and analyze the local government credibility and further propose effective policies to remodel government credibility.The first part of the paper is introduction, consisting of the background and significance of the topic, the domestic and foreign literature review, and the research idea and methodology. The second part of the paper combines the theoretical basis and characteristics of internet age, narrates the basis of the generation of government credibility and analyzes the factors influencing government credibility. The third part mainly discusses the realistic characteristics of the government credibility, indicating that the central government possesses much stronger credibility than local government, and the local government credibility tends to be weaker, which opposites to some western countries. The fourth part further analyzes the reason and harm of the loss of government credibility from the respect of local government itself in the terms of the case of "restriction on cars purchasing in Shenzhen" occurred in 2014. The last part proposes some reasonable suggestions on the basis of the paper analysis and domestic and foreign successful experiences.The conclusions of the paper can be listed as follows:(1) in the internet age, the public has the power to counter-balance the unreasonable policies by the governments, thus, government administrating and ruling behavior would be determined by the process of discussion and balance among multi social classes instead of government one-dimensional decision; (2) many other factors except for public and government would influence government credibility; (3) ruling failure is the main reason for weakening credibility; from the respect of government system reforms, the local governments should make efforts to find effective methods of remodeling government credibility according to the characteristics of the internet society.