Government Performance Evaluation Based On Citizen Participation

Citizen’s participation in government performance evaluation has become a hot issue in the academic circle both home and abroad against the background of ’government-centered’ to’citizen-centered’ transition. Government performance evaluation can promote governmental restructuring, improve its policy implementing capacity and enhance its administrative efficiency and service quality. Local citizens, as clients, directly experience its government’s practice; hence governments of the world are paying more and more attention to citizens’participation in their performances evaluation. Present research in China in this field usually starting from value inclination and effectiveness of the evaluation, analyses its importance, discusses citizen prominence as well as offers proposals about citizen participation, which often lacks operability.Both theory and practice in this field started late compared with that in western countries. Being in an initial stage, there are inadequacies in the practice with a limited scale of citizen participation and superficial and unsystematic theoretical study, and many issues remain to be solved. With the deepening of reform and opening-up in China, citizens’ expectations and demands are on the increase while difficulties of administrative reform are accumulating. To improve service quality and enhance citizens’rate of satisfaction, governments at all levels have initiated some explorations and practices in performances evaluation and certain theoretical results and practical experience attained. In recent years, activities such as Ten Thousand People Evaluating Government, Assessment of Citizens’Satisfaction Rate, etc. were conducted which got different response. In general, such activities lack broad participation and operability.The Qingdao Municipal People’s Government promoted Three-Citizen Activity among its59affiliated departments in2009to meet the needs of Qingdao’s social and economic development, to explore new mechanisms for citizen evaluation of government work and to satisfy people’s requirements of evaluation and supervision. The Three-Citizen Activity is an abbreviation of ’Reporting Their Work to Citizens, Soliciting Citizens’ Opinions and Inviting Citizens to Appraise Government Work’. The activity ranges from the beginning of November and ends by the end of December annually, during which the59departments’responsibilities, yearly objectives and end-of-year work reports are publicized on the webpage with an open opinion column. The departments concerned shall, in the middle of the activity present their work reports according to arrangements at a given time and in turn; and citizens evaluate their performances at the same time. A summarization of the citizens’ opinions shall serve to improve and innovate on government work in the future. The Activity has helped to perfect the communicative mechanism between the government and the public, improved work-style of the departments and raised work efficiency, thus highly confirmed by the public.Being a new-born thing, the Activity is still inadequate in some aspects like limited scope of citizen representation, lower motivation from the public, unsatisfactory government information transparency, lack mechanisms of systemization and normalization, inadequate responses to social concerns, etc. It is suggested that Qingdao City further perfect citizens’ participation mechanisms based on principles of combining evaluating items with citizens’ needs, of combining legitimacy with rationality, of combining scientificity with democracy, and effective cooperation to guarantee systematically citizen participation, expand new approaches for citizens to participate in government affairs, publicize government information and make government practices more transparent and so forth. These measures shall facilitate the municipal government and its departments to get more citizens to participate in governing, to better understand people’s needs and wants and to solicit more public opinion, which shall help to change work-style and enhance administrative efficiency.Despite its inadequacies, the Activity, being exemplary in nature, is of an innovative practice in perfecting China’s government performance evaluation system and for promoting citizen participation.