Research On Digital Empowerment Of Grass-Roots Deliberative Democracy

Nowadays,digital technologies such as big data,cloud computing,Internet of things,block chain and artificial intelligence turn out to be a pillar of urban development.The rapid development of digital technology and new media has brought new changes,opportunities and challenges to grass-roots governance and deliberative democracy.Compared with traditional media,digital technology has a more powerful empowerment function,which not only changes the traditional mode of information dissemination,but also changes the way of thinking,communication and political participation of the masses.The characteristics of openness,pluralism,sharing and interaction of digitization make people’s demands for socialist democracy more diverse and urgent.Digital empowerment has played an important role in promoting grass-roots deliberative democracy in the new era.At present,the theoretical research on deliberative democracy pays more attention to the field of traditional deliberative democracy,and there is a slight lack of research on the relationship between digital technology,new media and deliberative democracy,especially the case study of a specific community.Taking Luo Jiazhuang Community in Xihu District of Hangzhou as an example,this thesis aims to study the impact of digital empowerment on grass-roots deliberative democracy.During the process of researching the community deliberative democracy,this thesis explores the dilemma of grass-roots deliberative democracy in the traditional period,analyzes the way of grass-roots deliberative democracy under the digital background,as well as the problems exist in the current digital enabled grass-roots negotiation.Eventually,tries to put forward corresponding opinions and suggestions for the dilemma of digital enabled grass-roots negotiation.This thesis makes supplementary value for the research of urban community governance and digital enabled deliberative democracy,and has certain theoretical and practical significance for promoting the development of community governance and improving the consultation system.This thesis combs the process of grass-roots deliberative democracy in Luo Jiazhuang Community in stages,and tries to build a theoretical model of digital enabled grass-roots deliberative democracy according to the practice of deliberative democracy in the community and the existing theories mentioned during the literature review,which can be explained from three dimensions: subject driven,institutional norms and value guidance,and clarify the current situation of digital enabled grass-roots deliberative democracy.However,there are some problems in the traditional grass-roots deliberative democracy of Luo Jiazhuang Community,such as narrow coverage,low public participation,blocked interest expression channels,the tendency of community elites to seek private interests,and the low transformation efficiency of public policies.Under the new situation of digital empowerment,deliberative democracy in the community has a great positive impact in the four processes of organizational mobilization: interest integration,elite absorption and decision-making embedding.This thesis analyzes the new problems brought by the digital enabled deliberative democracy: In terms of subject driven,mainly exist in lacking of internal power and external differentiation;In terms of institutional norms,the division of functions and powers as well as laws and regulations are not perfect;In terms of value guidance,the fragmentation of digital information is difficult to form public rationality.According to the existed problems,this thesis discusses the reasons behind them,mainly including the defects of the concept of digital governance,the imperfection of digital laws and regulations,the lack of public awareness and so on.Based on which,aiming at the dilemma of digital enabled grass-roots deliberative democracy,this thesis tries to put forward some suggestions on deliberative democracy in the new era from three perspectives: stimulating the subject power,perfecting the digital system and strengthening the value guidance.