The Psychology And Values Of Street-Bureaucracy

Before the street-level bureaucracy theory put forward by Lipsky, many researchers have concerned about the decision-making and implementation of street-level bureaucrat. Street-level bureaucrat could be regarded as the forefront of government policy implementation, they have the closest interaction with the public and own much discretionary power. After street-level bureaucracy theory coming into China, many scholars focused on the actual situation of grass-roots cadres in china and analyzed it from controlling the right of the organization. But there are few studies about individual characteristics of the street-level bureaucrat. This paper bases on the data of Chongqing, Jiangxi and Qinghai, refers to the individual psychology and values of street-level bureaucrat, analyzes this group from three aspects:their psychological feeling about the public affairs; the values of the public interest as well as their perceptions and attitudes about the democracy.Meanwhile, exploring what factors affect their psychology and values is also important in this essay. Through descriptive study and regression models,we found out:The street-level bureaucrat have heavy task and a lot of work. Too much administrative affairs occupied the space of autonomy and social service. The job satisfaction of street-level bureaucrat is at the intermediate level, but the low salary and benefits, the lack of promotion opportunities have seriously affected the satisfaction of the street-level bureaucrat. At the same time, the street-level bureaucrat show a strong will of demission. Those younger and with higher levels of education have more obvious job burnout.About the concept of benefit, the street-level bureaucrat have high identity in the priority of collective interests. Those bureaucrat who have higher self-efficacy, less job burnout and higher job satisfaction trend to the priority of collective interests more obviously. At the same time, the evaluation of local residents’civic awareness and local citizenship rights protection behavior also affect the interest orientation of the street-level bureaucrat. When the local people have strong sense of democracy and much rights protection behavior happens, those street-level bureaucrat tend to take the collective interests as priority selection more. In the case of demolitions, most street-level bureaucrat agree the behavior is a reasonable action to protect individual interests. Most of them stand at the starting point of government, take the development of the city as a whole, hold the view that the individual interests should be subordinated to the collective interest. As for the methods, street-level bureaucrat resist using fierce ways to solve problems no matter from their personal point or from the government point. The result of correlation analysis shows that compared to the elders and non-Party members, the youngesr and the members of the Communist Party of China have stronger recognition that refusing to move means purchasing personal interest at the expense of collective interest. Men and the high educated bureaucrat prefer to protect the personal rights when they are in conflict with the government. The bureaucrat have higher job satisfaction are more inclined to making decisions from the overall interests of the government.The democracy view of street-level bureaucrat is combined of western liberal democracy values and the situation of China. They have a strong demands for the governance. The democratic attitudes shows those bureaucrat holding higher recognition of collectivism; having higher evaluation of people’s civic awareness; agreeing the effect of civic organizations more; having higher self-efficacy; agreeing the western liberal democratic values more tend to thinking that democracy is suitable for China.About the time of grass-root democratic self-government,those bureaucrat who have weaker family authority concept; stronger concept of collectivism; higher evaluation of the public election enthusiasm and democracy consciousness; higher evaluation of social organization;higher self-efficacy and lower identification of western liberal democracy agree that the time of democratic self-government is ripe more.