Analysis on the major obstacles of public participation in public policy-making

Participation in public policy-making is one of the important approaches for citizens to affect public policy, and also the guarantee of the scientific and democratic paths of the public policy. To enhance the cognitive level and ability of the citizen who participate in public policy-making, ensure the institutionalization and procedures of the public policy-making, make the information about the public policy-making open and transparent, this paper points out the main obstacles of citizens＇ participation in public policy-making mostly at present and enhance the quality of public policy.     

信息公开、公众参与和开放型政府建设

传统行政管理组织的不透明性、严格的等级制度等,造成了一系列的政府问题。要解决这些问题就必须建立一种新型的政府,即"开放型政府"。开放型政府是一个信息输入与输出的循环体,公众参与即输入的过程,信息公开则是输出的过程,而"开放"就是由一个输入和输出构成的不断互动的环路。建设开放型政府是全球化和知识产业化的必然要求,是民主的必然要求,是世界各国政府建设的必然趋势,它对中国意义更加重要。目前开放型政府建设还存在诸如信息公开不足、公众参与不够等问题,因此,要加强开放型政府建设应该从这两方面入手:通过转变观念、加强立法等促进信息公开;从扩大基层民主、拓宽公民参与渠道等推动公众参与。     

Machinery of government and standards in public service: teaching new dogs old tricks

Abstract

For much of the last thirty years the main leitmotif animating Civil Service reform in the UK has been that efficiency and effectiveness in public services can be achieved by adapting management methods and practices derived from commercial enterprise. In the process of making the dreams and schemes of that plural singularity we have come to call ‘managerialism’ operational though, something valuable appears to have been lost, and that something is the Civil Service as a unified ‘constitutional bureaucracy’. In this article I explore some of the unfortunate governmental and administrative consequences of these managerially minded reforms. In particular, I seek to highlight the continuing relevance of what have been routinely characterized as outmoded and anachronistic machineries of government, and to stress the importance of the increasingly forgotten core business of public administration: the running of a state and of a constitution.     

Public Information and Regulatory Processes: What the Public Knows and Regulators Decide

Because bureaucratic agencies may be less transparent in their decision processes than legislatures, most states have developed processes to incorporate input from regulated communities and other parties potentially affected by regulations. Administrative agencies may encourage democratic practices to increase legitimacy and accountability of the bureaucracy and improve decision‐making processes. However, rules governing the regulatory process vary by state, with some incorporating more open practices than others. Understanding these dynamics is increasingly important, as the rulemaking process has become central to policymaking over the past several decades, with a large portion of policymaking authority delegated to administrative agencies. Drawing from regulatory documents, rulemaking comments, media coverage, and interviews with regulators in 14 regulatory decision processes across five states, this study finds that while states vary in their approach to providing access to information, there are overriding patterns that reduce the role of citizens and the overall transparency of regulatory processes.     

Information technology and education： Partnership vs. competition

Information technology is coming strong to have influential impact upon what is going on in the formal education sector. During the past ten years, information technology almost became the first job choice among all the new faces finding their jobs. Job opportunity also has its great impact upon what is going on in the k-12 education. Ideally, information technology is to enhance a teacher＇s teaching. However, on-site classroom observations as revealed here, identified several things that we might want to work more to provide better learning environment for the young generation on an individual basis. We have to admit that although memorization of the old day＇s factual knowledge and skill is important, but is going to provide little help for the generation to come. Information technology brings brand new era to human beings, and new format of schooling can take different forms from the ones most of us had been experiencing during our school lives.     

An investigation on information management issues in Albanian public administration

Political changes in the early 1990s created an opportunity for the Albanians to increase communication with the rest of the world. For the first time Albanians were exposed to technology and tools that had been used so frequently in the neighbor countries decades in advance. Despite the great promise of technological advancement, public sector innovation has tended to be small-scale and gradual. Factors such as institutional arrangements, budget scarcity, group conflict, cultural norms and prevailing patterns of social and political behavior have restricted government actions. This study examines issues caused by a poor information management and looks for some ways to turn into an efficient information system in Albanian public administration. It uses primary data from sample surveys of public administration organizations in local and central level during these transitions.     

Regulatory Analysis Procedures and Political Influence on Bureaucratic Policymaking

Well‐known theories suggest that administrative procedures may be used as mechanisms of political control of the bureaucracy. This study investigates whether three common regulatory analysis procedures—cost‐benefit analysis, risk assessment, and economic impact analysis—lead to greater influence by political officials on bureaucratic policymaking. Multivariate analyses of data from a unique survey of state administrators indicate that regulatory analysis requirements are associated with decreases in the perceived influence of elected political officials on the content of administrative rules. This association is particularly evident in cases where proposed rules are subjected to a cost–benefit test. These findings contradict prominent theories of administrative procedures, but are consistent with recent research on the political power of administrative agencies.     

Keeping warm cookies: Cultural discourses of fun talk in public participation

ABSTRACT

Declining rates of public participation in the United States of America have raised questions about the sustainability and effectiveness of U.S. democracy. Some scholars have called for making democracy fun through the use of game design to make public participation more accessible. Using cultural discourse analysis, this study explores the locally situated communication practices of a civil society organization called Warm Cookies of the Revolution that seeks to (re)imagine U.S. democracy by making public participation fun. The research employs ‘fun talk’ – a specific communication practice within public participation – as an analytical unit and finds that fun talk served as a discursive hub of emotion with radiants of meaning connected to being, acting, and relating. In contrast to those who have argued fun democratic practices should employ game design to improve public administration, participants understood fun talk as a way to introduce them to civic affairs, form relationships with neighbours, and take action to improve their communities. The article discusses implications for theories of emotion and affect in civil society scholarship.     

Lived citizenship as the locus of political agency in participatory policy

Participatory policies seeking to foster active citizenship continue to be dominated by a territorial imagination. Yet, the world where people identify and perform as citizens is spatially multifarious. This article engages with the tension between territorially grounded perceptions and relational modes of practicing political agency. Studying empirically the Finnish child and youth policies, we address jointly the participatory obligations that municipalities strive to fulfill, and the spatial attachments that children and young people establish in their lived worlds. To this end, we introduce the concept of lived citizenship as an interface where the territorially-bound public administration and the plurality of spatial attachments characteristic to transnational living may meet. We conclude by proposing a re-grounding of lived citizenship in both topological and topographical terms as an improvement in theoretical understanding of mundane political agency and as a step towards more proficient participatory policies.     

Technocracy,democracy, and public policy: An evaluation of public participation in retrospective regulatory review

Retrospective review of existing regulations is an increasingly common aspect of the regulatory policy cycle. As with prospective regulatory policymaking, public participation is a central feature of many retrospective review initiatives. Despite its theoretical and practical significance, participation in retrospective review has received little scholarly attention. This paper presents the first systematic assessment of participation in United States retrospective regulatory review. Utilizing content analysis of an original dataset of government documents and public input produced pursuant to Executive Orders 13563, 13579, and 13610, the paper analyzes participatory institutional design, the level and composition of participants, and participation processes. The results suggest that retrospective review participation processes largely reflected the modes of stakeholder outreach and engagement employed in prospective regulatory policymaking, but resulted in comparatively low levels of participation. Consistent with the purposes enumerated in the executive orders, participation processes facilitated information exchange and were relatively representative of and responsive to stakeholders.     

健全公共信息系统，完善政府危机决策

章阐述了危机决策中信息系统的构成，分析了我国公共信息系统的不足，提出了健全我国公共信息系统的建议。     

社会信息化迅猛发展背景下的政治参与和沟通

社会信息化程度的迅猛发展成为我们这个时代最重要的特征之一。信息化程度的发展对于民主政治的推进既是挑战,也是机会和动力,其中影响最直接的就是政治参与和政治沟通。政治参与和政治沟通是民主政治发展的重要表现,政治参与和政治沟通又以信息化的发展为依托。信息交流方式的变革对于民主政治的发展产生了深刻影响,互联网的普及带来的"网络民主"成为政治参与的重要形式,通过新型媒介进行政治沟通是民主政治发展的新形式。     

Destroying one Public Service Bargain Without Making Another: A Comment on Lowe and Pemberton,The Official History of the British Civil Service,Volume II: 1982–1997

This article responds to Lowe and Pemberton's second volume on the history of the civil service and analyses fundamental shifts in British governance at the centre that occurred during the 1980s and 1990s. The traditional ‘public service bargain’ (PSB) that underpinned the relationship between ministers and officials has been repeatedly undermined. The article examines how far prior civil service reforms relate to the changes of the contemporary era instigated by Conservative‐led governments since 2010. As Lowe and Pemberton's work illustrates, the impulse to reform the state and the managerial reforms it unleashed were long in the making. Their legacy can be traced to the emergence of Thatcherism after 1979. The core argument of the article is that the more recent efforts of the Johnson administration to transform the state and undermine the PBS were scarcely original. Rather, they consolidated and drew upon earlier initiatives.     

The growth of policies,rules, and regulations: A review of the literature and research agenda

This article reviews the vibrant literature on policy growth in political science and adjacent disciplines, thus offering a conceptual framework for situating past and future research efforts and facilitating the engagement between them. The first part presents important concepts that capture policy growth or aspects of it (rule growth, policy layering, policy mixes, policy accumulation, policyscapes, the policy state) and dominant measurement approaches. The second part provides an overview of the main drivers of policy growth in advanced democracies, discussing the role of societal demands, political competition, institutional fragmentation, and bureaucratic processes. The third part outlines the multi-faceted and far-reaching consequences of policy growth for policy, politics, and the polity. While policy growth is often portrayed as the price to pay for upholding the democratic capitalist order in constantly modernizing and diversifying societies, the existing research also points to the negative consequences emanating from increased state activity. Policy growth not only threatens to overburden bureaucracies and thereby undermine policy effectiveness; it may also transform the institutional structure of the democratic state and make its politics more complicated and conflictual.     

Public administration schools and institutes had better enhance information literacy training for senior public servants

Senior public servants are leading forces of national economic development, social progress and national revival, as well as the organizers and decision makers of informatization construction. Public administration schools and institutes had better enhance information literacy education for public servants, in particular, the training of information consciousness and information competency of senior public servants should be emphasized.     

Lay Public or Experts? e‐Participation in Authorization for GMO Products in the European Union

In the European Union, for the first time, lay people can participate directly in the procedure of assessment of GMO (genetically modified organisms) products, an exercise normally reserved for scientists and legal experts. What makes this a unique strategy of participation is that for each single application for authorization, lay people have the opportunity to express their views. This article presents the result of the first in‐depth analysis of this type of Internet participatory exercise in the first years of its implementation. It shows that, despite generally participatory technology assessment aims at deliberative consensus on technical questions, this forum is instead a way to expose the work of regulative authorities to public scrutiny and to express dissent and opposition to the European Commission policy on GMOs.     

Latin–American public financial reporting: recent and future development

In recent years, numerous Latin–American countries have carried out reforms in their public accounting systems, with technical cooperation provided by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Taking into account the lack of international accounting standards for the public sector, USAID has designed a model termed Integrated Financial Management System for Latin America and the Caribbean (IFMS or SIMAFAL). This model is intended to provide better financial information for governmental decision‐taking as regards the allocation of resources; a further goal is to achieve greater transparency and for a higher degree of responsibility to be accepted for the commitments made and the results of activities undertaken. Important changes are currently taking place on the international public accounting scene and the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC) is pressing for the adoption of a set of international public accounting standards by Latin–American countries. In this article, we compare the level of information included in the year‐end governmental public report in Latin–American countries which have carried out their reforms outside SIMAFAL with that of others which have followed this model. Second, we examine the extent to which the public financial reporting practices recommended by IFAC coincide with those adopted by the above countries. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

政府公共关系的科学化与专业化探析——基于“新公共管理”的视角

政府公共关系是政府实施公共管理的一项重要职能。随着政府治理和新公共管理实践的发展，迫切需要重新发掘政府公共关系的价值，促进其科学化和专业化。对于处在社会转型和逐步融入国际社会的发展中国家来说，是否具备科学化和专业化的政府公共关系职能，已经成为衡量政府治理能力现代化的重要指标。适时提出政府公共关系的科学化和专业化，是深入贯彻落实科学发展观，提高政府治理效能、转变政府职能、促进公民政治参与、构建和谐社会的需要，也是“新公共管理”实践发展的必然要求。     

The debates on public investments in Japan

Since the economic bubble burst, Japan has been in a long-term recession. To stimulate the economy, improve the infrastructure and increase employment, the Japanese Government injected a substantial amount of money into public works in the 1990s. However, these public investments had limited utility but incurred huge debts. These public investments have become a controversial issue. The Japanese Government could not but promote many reforms concerning public investments. This paper focuses on Japan＇s case and introduces the debates on public investments.     

言息化时代区域舆论引导策略

现在我国已经进入信息化时代,信息化时代区域舆论有着明显的特点,那就是传播链广泛、传播速度快、容易被人误导等等,这些问题的存在使当前党的舆论引导工作难度不断增大。要想解决信息化时代区域舆论引导问题,必须在分析现区域舆论发展特点的基础上,详细分析舆论传播链,从控制好舆论传播链入手,辅以其他措施实现对区域舆论的有效控制,防止区域舆论异变给区域社会经济发展带来的不利影响。