Research On Taxi Policy Change Process From The Perspective Of Policy Change Theory

Online car-hailing service is a typical representative of the "Internet +" new format,since emergence,it shows rapid popularization and prosperous development.However,with the development of online car-hailing service,traditional taxi market got hard shocks,market share decreasing,driver income declining and heavy " Contract Fee " still paying,which led to the traditional taxi group's discontent and protest,triggered many times incidents of mass strikes.In addition,online car-hailing service also appeared a number of vicious events,such as robbery,murder,etc.,which brought hidden trouble to the public travel safety,causing the concern of the government and society,and made the government began to reform the taxi industry.In July 28,2016,the Ministry of Transport released "Guidelines on Deepening Reform to Further Promote the Healthy Development of taxi industry " and "Interim Measures for the Management of Taxi Operators for Internet Reservation",defined online car-hailing service as"Online car-hailing Taxi" and gave it formal operation qualification,and also,two documents proposed to deepen the reform of traditional taxi.Since then,Taxi reform comes to an end.This paper regards taxi reform process as the research object,in order to study the evolution of taxi policy process,and understand how the taxi reform policy agenda opened?How do multi actors interact with each other to influence the government's decisions?What are the reasons for the policy compromise?How about the future of taxi policy reform?Through the discussion of these issues,not only we can get a better understanding of the taxi industry,estimate the focus and forms of future Taxi Reform,but it also can provide reference for other industry reform which was caused by new format.This paper aims to analyze taxi policy change,while there are many theories of policy change,each of them has its applicability and limitation,then,to avoid weaknesses and to make the best use of the strength of them,it constructs a systematic theoretical analysis framework,based on the Multiple Streams Theory,Advocacy Coalition Theory and Policy Network Theory.Using Multiple Streams Theory,this paper introduces problem streams,political streams and policy streams in the agenda-setting process of the taxi policy,and then explains how the agenda opens under the coupling of the three streams.Both Advocacy Coalition and Policy Network Theory study inter action between policy actors,Advocacy Coalition Theory studies beliefs,while Policy Network Theory focuses on interests.In the process of taxi policy reform,both beliefs and interests motivates the actors to make choices.Thus,based on these two theories,this paper analyzes the dynamic game between policy actors by explaining how different coalitions make decisions and how networks interact with each other after agenda opens.The results suggest that in the taxi policy process,different coalitions have different interests while they own the same resources,and the final policy output is actually a multi-actor negotiations under the policy compromise.For the taxi policy reform,although the legal status of the online car-hailing service has been established,barriers to enter this industry has been increased,and also,it balances the interests between the network booking car owners and traditional taxi driver groups,and then improves the management system of traditional taxi cars.With the specific analysis on the taxi policy process,we can find that the taxi industry has been suffering from severe drawbacks for a long time which has never aroused much attention until the emergence of online car-hailing service.That means this reform is not initiated with prospective plan.Besides,despite positive reform results,the implementation performance varies from place to place due to lack of restrict on the pace.As a lesson learned from it,our government must enhance its learning process to improve the foresight and initiative of any reform,so that we can find the problem and solve the problem as soon as possible.At the same time,the evaluation of the reform stage is necessary to supervise the implementation of it.Last but not the least,with the study on the whole process of the reform and the related policy text,it can be foreseen that the traditional taxi will be the following focus of taxi reform,especially regarding the price mechanism,exit mechanism and operation management.Meanwhile,the reform will be carried out in a more moderate and gradual way.