Study On Influencing Factors Of Public Participation Intention In Government Affairs Microblog

Since the reform and opening up, the party and the government have always stressed "public participation", and take it as an important part of promoting democracy with Chinese characteristics.Because of social transformation, the traditional social connections are broken, and the emergence of social protest makes the existing ways of communication weak. The basic way to solve this contradiction, is to open up new ways to participate, using modern scientific and technological means to improve the efficiency of participation, satisfying public participation requirements,increasing the number, quality and weight of government speeches. According to the statistics of2015 Sina’s Report of Government Microblog, by the end of December, 2015, the number of China’s certified government microblogs has exceeded 150,000, and microblog has become a “standard configuration” of the party and government departments, and a new bridge between government and people. How to make full use of the microblog for the effective interaction between government and the public, and achieve the well-organized public participation by guiding the public to combine appeals of social reality and demands of the virtual community together is the main problem of government management and academic research currently. To better play the role of microblog, it is needed to pay attention to and actively encourage public participation in information browsing and interaction with the government through the microblog. Besides, it is important to explore the influential factors of public participation intention from the perspective of public demands, and improve the management of microblog focusing on these factors.The domestic researches on public participation in government microblog are rare, and by reviewing domestic and foreign researches, it is found that the study on electronic public participation lacks explanation. The reasons can be roughly divided into four parts:(1) The theoretical support in the field is from business environment(for example: Technology Acceptance Model) and from Democratic Theory in the field of political science and philosophy. Because of the "eclectic use" of theories form related fields, researchers may ignore the characteristics of government as well as e-government, affecting the explanation of public electronic participation;(2) To verify the existing theories with empirical research methods may hinder findings of new theories;(3) The pure theoretical researches ignore the real environmental and cannot draw new research conclusion;(4) Fragmentation of research perspectives may impede the macro perspective. Above all, in order to explore influential factors of public participation in government microblogs more systematically, an inductive method is needed to find new theoretical factors and confirm the problems of fragmentation. Based on this, this paper chose mixed methods,combined qualitative research methods and quantitative analysis methods to study on influential factors of public participation intention in government microblog. The specific steps of this paper are as follows.First of all, this paper defined government microblog, public participation and other core concepts, and reviewed domestic and foreign literature of "public participation" according to bibliometrics methods; worked out the technical route of this study: qualitative research- theory model- quantitative analysis- countermeasures- research prospect; Secondly, based on grounded theory, this paper coded the interview materials through Nvivo 8.0, realized the theoretical saturation,obtained the theoretical model of influential factors of public participation intention in e-government microblog, and performed quantitative analysis according to the model. Then, it conducted empirical test with questionnaires to testify the model. The questionnaire adopted Likert’s five-point scale, and contains questioned transformed from various influential factors of public participation intention.SPSS 19.0 was used for data analysis, and specific analytical methods included reliability and validity analysis, descriptive statistical analysis, correlation analysis and regression analysis. At last,according to the research results, this paper provided suggestions and countermeasures about the communication, operation strategy and other aspects of government microblog from an overall perspective.Through quantitative and qualitative research, this paper drew the following conclusions.Positive correlations exist between government factors and external environment factors, media factors and external environment factors, public factors and external environment factors, media factors and government factors, public factors and government factors, media factors and public factors. Occupation, income, education and frequency of use are positively related to public participation. The regression analysis showed that the overall effect of regression model reached a significant level. Government, external environment, media and public factors exert a strong influence on public intention of participation. Based on this, this paper put forward following suggestions respectively. Construct regional association matrixes of information on government microblogs, set up integration platforms of micro-government affairs; improve the system construction of microblogs, and form public participation-oriented working mechanism; strengthen the construction of interaction, communication, integration, excavation and performance, enhance the cohesion of government microblog; create a good atmosphere of public participation; strengthen the platform construction of government microblog and improve the ability of service operation;grasp the laws of media operation, and concentrate on content construction; and improve customer satisfaction based on public needs.