Deliberation-oriented Public Opinion Analysis

In the policy making process, extensive public participation and discussion now occurs very often, and also plays an important role in the policy making as well as implementing process. But in reality, however, far-ranging public participation does not necessarily guarantee that democratic and scientific policies will be made based on the following two main reasons. Firstly, there are anfractuous benefits and values in public discourse, which is well beyond policy makers’ power to determine the rationality of all those benefits and values. Secondly, the lack of benefit coordination system, which can provide a win-win possibility for the stakeholders, also keeps public participation from helping with democratic and scientific policies making. This paper tries to find out solutions to the problems mentioned above from policy science theories.This paper, using the public transportation price reform in Beijing as an example, tries to design a policy-making oriented and practical public opinion analysis method. This method will illustrate how people give the same policy issue different meanings from different aspects, study the features of public discourse and the logics of argument in depth, show the complicated disputes in the policy making process, and finally, reach an agreement through a negotiation mechanism.First of all, this paper reviews the existing researches about discourse analysis in policy science, and discusses the approaches that can be used to match the discourse analysis to the public opinion analysis. Based on this, this paper then comes up with the deliberation-oriented public opinion analysis framework(DPOA), which contains three steps: they are respectively the analysis of public self-narrative, the evaluation of public opinion and the establishment of negotiation mechanism. Every step is explained in detail in this paper.Secondly, this paper examines the feasibility of this method by using the public transportation price reform in Beijing as an example. This paper finds out that, service, traffic lines planning, comfort, safety and other needs were the main issues people cared about. In the argumentation process of price reform, public transportation was the target of meaning competition and control of different interest groups. Price-rising supporters showed the usage of market discourse, safety discourse and justice discourse, while price-rising opponents highlighted economy discourse, people’s livelihood discourse and environment discourse. In the argumentation process of price reform, the emotional expressions were almost positive, in the meanwhile, other strategies were also used, such as framework expansion, group image construction and tragic narrative. The factors that can have impact on public opinion included benefit, value, culture, and emotion. The opaque system and lack of public participation was the main reason for the citizens’ rejection of price-rising. Based on this, a simulative negotiation experiment proved that sufficient communication and expression can contribute to the agreement in the policy-making process and the third-party mediator is one of the powerful tools to solve public conflicts effectively.Finally, this paper explains the future opportunities, weaknesses and improvement ideas of DPOA.