The Problems Existing In The Citizen Network Participation In The Policy Process And Policy Suggestions

Since the mid-1990s,network information technology has been flourishing across the world;the network information technology era was brought about by the thriving Internet technology revolution.Thanks to the advent of the Internet,people's political life style has seen a great number of changes.Currently,a tremendously significant force is affecting and participating in China's politics and public policies;actually,the force derives from the huge number of netizens.While playing an extremely crucial role in China's current public opinion expression and political participation,network participation has changed the previous traditional public policy process.The emergence of the special phenomenon Network participation has attracted the attention of a fraction of scholars who come from the fields such as public policy,public administration and political science.Differing from existing studies in focal points,the research carried out in this paper is stressing on the analysis of the relationship between two variables,which are network involvement and public policy process.The paper is aimed at addressing these issues:How did Chinese citizens realize their participation in the public policy process through the Internet?What impacts did citizens' network participation have on the public policy process?In this paper,an analytical framework whose core is policy network is constructed;the policy network was formed by the citizens'network participation in the public policy process;under the framework,the policy network is analyzed from the macro environment level to the micro individual level.Seen from the macro-level perspective,the policy network environment is comprised by netizens' participation background and approach.Certain political,economic,technical and social circumstances could breed and cultivate citizens'network participation.Due to citizens' political participation failures in real life,citizens are compelled to realize their political participation via the Internet.Citizens ' network participation ability and enthusiasm are being promoted by the growing network economy and the changing economic situations at home and abroad;the rapid development of information and Internet technology has made the realization of network participation possible;the expansion of network participation is closely associated with China's emerging and developing civil society.Seen from the micro-level perspective,in order to achieve the action goals,such as the communication between the government,the media,netizens,social organizations;in this way,public policy process could be promoted through using citizens' network participation to form the policy network.Chinese citizens are using various Internet platforms to input their individual opinions and express their preferences into the government.However,citizens' network participation also has a dual effect;on the one hand,it plays a positive role in government administration;on the other hand,it poses an enormous challenge to the government administration.In terms of network participation at earlier phase,the government's major response measure is monitoring.However,with the constant deepening of the awareness on network participation,an increasing number of local government leaders and political leaders has stopped viewing network participation as a great disaster;on the contrary,they began to directly face the public opinion on the network with more inclusive and open attitudes;they shifted their policies from the strict monitoring at the beginning to the current active guiding and responding.The policy learning process's transformation from blocking into dredging suggests the government has changed their response measures.