Does Government Performance Assessment Decrease Or Increase The Formalism In Local Government?

For a long time,the intractable and repetitive formalism causes a waste of government resources,leads to low governance efficiency,violates the public interests,making its political legitimacy into question.Since the Eighteenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China,General Secretary Xi Jinping gives important instructions on reinforcing conduct improved and strictly avoiding formalism.He emphasizes that we should firmly oppose all pointless formalities not just from ideological style but from system.The central government also issues several documents,giving some instructional suggestions on updating the assessment methods,to reduce the burden on communitylevel officials and encourage their practical orientation.Governments at all levels actively explore ways to reduce formalism at the level of government performance evaluation.They try to achieve the goal of reducing formalism by changing the government performance evaluation mode.Based on the existing theoretical results and practical experience,we summarize the way of changing assessment methods as: "reductive" assessment and "incremental" assessment.Then,can these two methods of changing government performance evaluation effectively reduce formalism? If so,how does the former affect the latter?Focusing on the above research questions,the thesis mainly studies the government performance assessment reason of formalism in the local government.Specifically,relying on bureaucracy theory,government performance management theory,and motivation theory,we adopt literature study,typological study,social interview method,multi-case comparative study etc.to study the impact of the government performance evaluation change on formalism and reveal the Influence mechanism in theory;By comparing the two different cases of L Sub-district Office and T Sub-district Office,we find that changing the evaluation mode can’t achieve the ideal results.The important reason for local government formalism is the mismatch of appraisal targets and incentive settings.Then this paper returns to the theoretical level,to further study how the mismatch of appraisal target and incentive settings affects formalism.Finally,we explore the optimization path of government performance assessment,and put forward corresponding policy recommendations to reduce formalism.Specifically,the thesis mainly includes the following contents:Firstly,based on the existing literature review and combined with the specific reform measures,the change of government performance assessment method is summarized as "reductive" assessment and "incremental" assessment.Then we define the concept of government formalism.Under the guidance of bureaucracy theory,performance management theory and incentive theory,this chapter illustrates the research question:will it reduce formalism by changing the way of government performance assessment?Secondly,this part studies the possibility of formalism reduction by changing method of government performance assessment from the perspectives of theory and try to reveal the influence mechanism.According to the two dimensions including assessment tendency and incentive degree,formalism is divided into four types: vanity projects,traceism,negative behaviors,and selective responses.On this basis,this chapter analyzes how the "reductive" assessment and "incremental" assessment target for different types of formalism and realize the superiority complementarily to reduce formalism.To verify this theoretical finding,this chapter conduct an empirical study.The thesis takes L Sub-district Office and T Sub-district Office as the research objects and selects four typical cases of "reductive" assessment or "incremental" assessment.The case studies find that the theoretical assumptions are questioned in practical.The mismatch between assessment targets and incentive settings causes its failure of effectively reduced the formalism.Then,we return to the theoretical level once again to study how the mismatch of assessment goals and incentive settings affects formalism.According to the measure difficulty and achieving difficulty of the targets,the thesis adopts the typological study dividing the appraisal targets into four categories.Combined with the incentive intensity and its direction,we find that different types of mismatches between assessment targets and incentives settings will lead to different types of formalism.Finally,from the assessment goals and the incentive mechanisms point of view,we propose an optimized path for government performance assessment,and put forward policy recommendations including many dimensions,which tries to provide a reference for formalism reduction.This thesis follows this logic: starting from the theoretical level and extracting the principles,testing the theoretical principles through empirical research,and then condensing new theoretical discoveries from practice to provide theoretical basis for new practice.