Consociational Participation:Research On Resident Participation Of Chinese Urban Communities

How to improve the standard of urban grass-roots democratic construction has always been the widely concerned issue of the CPC,the government and all circles of the society.Democracy signifies participation,which is the initial manifestation of democracy.Obviously,the effective resident participation is indispensable for the improvement of grass-roots democratic quality.Through investigating,the writer finds that some urban communities of Sichuan Province have explored a new pattern of participation during the process of developing resident participation,that is,consociational participation,which is mainly based on the identity equalization of participants.By way of conversation,negotiation,intervention and others,consociational participation makes residents a dominant role in community public affairs with broad appeal for residents to participate and demand.After the further analysis of this new pattern of participation,the writer divides the pattern into three types possessing their own values according to various participants,namely,mass governance under the Party's leading,elite representation and public negotiation.Mass governance under the Party's leading could give full play to the core guide of grass-roots Party committee and government,while elite representation could solve the problem that some residents are absent and boost the professional level and quality of consociational participation.As to the public negotiation,it is applicable to all kinds of participants so that anybody could express his demand.In terms of this characteristic,public negotiation provides a good example for enriching the practice of consociational democracy theory in urban community.However,this type,not flawless,still has its own imperfection such as excessive administrative intervention,conservativeness and tradition of elites,scarcity of residents' public reason and short supply of institutional platform.These and other defects would trap the totally new democratic pattern into the past mode of “formalism”.Therefore,the writer come up with perfecting methods for these three types with the hope that this new pattern of participation would go further during the progress of promoting grass-roots democracy of our country.