Research On Local Government's Logic Of Selective Response In Policy Struggle

Under the background of contemporary social structure transformation,the civil policy struggle induced by fierce collision of new and old contradictions,to a certain extent,determines the final trend of local policies in China,and demands the improvement of local government's policy response ability.Generally speaking,policy struggle mainly refers to the phenomenon,that policy victims force policymakers or policy beneficiaries to change their policy preferences through tough actions,thus influencing the policy objectives.It is aimed at changing local government's policy attitudes or behaviors,emphasizing the resistance intention of policy audiences.As a policy grassroots practitioner,the role of local government deeply embedded in social reality,determines that it is the most likely one to become the policy struggle's target.Trapped in realistic response paradox between "Bureaucratic Totalitarianism and Democratic Response","Performance Appraisal and Social Stability","Policy Weakness and Excessive Participation",the local government's choice of response to policy struggle is particularly important.Therefore,to understand the selective response and its internal interaction logic of local governments in the process of frequent policy struggles is the focus of this paper.The paper took local government's multiple response game in policy struggle as the research starting point,and analyzed its paradoxes of value,motivation and effect in response to policy struggles.It's believed that public policy struggle is the result of benefit games between government and policy audiences,where local government is forced to make policy responses to public demands by people's drastic actions.And the ultimate goal of local government in this process is to realize optimization of risk-cost and economic-benefit.Based on literature research and practical investigation,the paper coded three key factors that affect local government's response choice to policy struggle by method of mixed qualitative research,including "Degree of Agreement between Government and People's interests","Risk Threshold of Performance and Responsibility" and "Cohesion of Policy Struggle",and proposed a responsive three-dimensional model by combining local governments' different responsive results in policy struggles,which was tested by study based on 20 policy struggle cases.Based on the three-dimensional responsive model proposed by study,the study made an in-depth comparative analysis for three policy struggles happened in Shanghai.It is found that,the essence of local government's selective response to policy struggle and its changing,is the comprehensive assessment for potential risks and benefits influenced by three core elements in a certain situation.In the process of seeking the dynamic balance between "policy objectives" and "social stability",local government will make a final responsive choice in different degrees from three aspects,including response speed,response range and response mode,that are,light response—verbal interpretation,moderate response—policy fine-tuning,heavy response—policy change.It's also found that,although local government try to make the most benefit selective response in policy struggle,its real selection will also be restricted by its actual abilities and conditions,including its abilities of cognition,response and disposition to the policy struggle.Generally speaking,the main purpose of this study is to clarify local government's internal motivation and logic behind its responsive choice in policy struggles through the comparative study of different policy struggles,which has practical values for the governance of policy conflicts and the construction of responsive government.The limitations of this paper are as follows:firstly,due to the contingency of policy struggle outbreak,the structural degree of case selection needs to be further improved;secondly,the paper only carried out comparative analysis by method of mixed qualitative research,but is relatively insufficient in quantitative analysis level;thirdly,the study only focuses on the analysis and presentation of problems without any solutions.Therefore,the comparative quantitative study on local government's selective response to policy struggles and the solution proposals to its existing problems,will be a further study direction that needs attentions in future.