Leadership Attention And The Strategy Of Local Government Behavior

Local government is crucial to local economic and social development,and its behavior has aroused wide interest of many scholars.In the multi-task competitive environment,the limited attention of local governments is inevitably unable to accommodate multiple tasks at the same time.Through the COVID-19 prevention and control of local government response strategy,found that the strength of the government and leadership attention basically keep the overall direction.As a signal lamp,leadership attention guides the direction of local governments to judge the priority of the task.Local governments respond differently to leaders with different strengths and incentives.At the same time,local governments do not completely take the attention of leaders as the signal light of their behavior.Their specific choices are also influenced by various factors such as their own interests,capabilities and resources,reflecting the different priorities of local governments in economic development,political status,social stability and other aspects.The key to the transformation of local government behavior is not the constraint of a single material resource or the constraint of leadership attention,but the product of the contradiction and integration of the two.Local governments will weigh the advantages and disadvantages between the leaders’ attention and the interests of local governments to sort and choose different tasks,so as to make corresponding behaviors to maximize their interests.The essence of this process is the distribution of political attention.Reference,absorb the existing political attention academic achievements,based on the background of institutional structure,we can refine and summarize the logic and law of local governments to deal with the attention of leaders by analyzing the problem of how local governments examine the signals released by the superior and self-interest needs and their behavior in coping with leadership attention.First of all,based on the political background of the interaction between different levels of government,combined with the assessment index system of Chinese officials,the communication mode of leadership attention and other institutional environment,to investigate the policy response behaviors of local governments in COVID-19 prevention and control,and find the distribution law of policy attention.Secondly,on this basis,from the institutional factors,local government interests,social environment and other perspectives to analyze the deep reasons behind the different policy attention allocation behavior;Thirdly,focusing on the identification and capture of leadership attention by local governments,the process of weighing leadership attention against the benefits of local interests,and the final attention allocation strategy of local governments,draw the micro mechanism of policy attention distribution of local officials.Finally,summarize the double action logic of local officials,that is,local governments have a natural attribute to satisfy the attention of leaders and also have a self-interest tendency.The study shows that: first,when facing the priority of multitask,local governments must deal with the internal tension and conflict between satisfying leaders’ attention and self-interest,in order to maximize their interests.Second,the conflict is the combination of external environment and internal motivation;local government is not only a single local agent subordinate to the central and superior government,nor is it a purely rational economic man who blindly protects the development interests within his jurisdiction also.Their attention allocation is a dynamic process of constantly weighing the pros and cons according to specific circumstances.Third,the externalization of leadership attention is often manifested as the intensity and incentive form of releasing signals,which affects the attention behavior logic of local governments.When the leaders pay strong attention,the local government overall holds a positive attitude,and the specific situation varies according to the different forms of incentives: with strong incentive attention,local governments follow the logic of "record invitation";with strong accountability attention,local governments follow the logic of "avoid accountability".In contrast,local governments will adopt a negative and conservative behavior orientation under the low-intensity leadership attention.In general,in the context of the need to take into account the Covid-19 prevention and control’s requirements of the superiors and the local economic development,the essence of leadership attention-local government relationship is a dynamic process of multi-interest goal game.Local governments implement a "attention strategist" of active,passive,pursuit record and avoid accountability.