Research On Vertical Blame Avoidance Behavior Of Local Government Under The Perspective Of Technological Governance

After the 18 th CPC National Congress,with the transformation of national governance,local governments,especially grassroots governments,have taken on multiple governance tasks from the central government and played an important role in the process of national governance modernization.With the deepening of governance standardization,technical governance has been introduced into the practice of grassroots governance,but it has also brought some negative effects.The superiors use quantitative indicators,procedural supervision and rigid assessment to put pressure on the grass-roots level,which makes the grass-roots government face the political risk of high-pressure accountability.In order to respond to the requirements of the superiors,the grass-roots level derives the behavior of avoiding responsibility step by step.This not only increases the work burden of grassroots cadres,breeding the phenomenon of "lying flat",lazy and idle administration,but also leads to the formalized implementation of grassroots work,further aggravating the grass-roots trace doctrine.Existing studies have interpreted the evasive behavior of grassroots governments from the perspectives of institutional structure,liability risk and individual psychology,but there is a lack of discussion on the inter-governmental evasive behavior from the perspective of technical governance.The behavior of avoiding responsibility among local governments is closely related to the practical logic of technological governance in the field of grassroots governance.Technological governance influences the actions of local governments through three mechanisms: management by objectives,process control and political accountability.First of all,in the task layout stage,the county government realizes the responsibility binding with the township government by issuing documents and signing "responsibility letter",and the work and responsibility are pushed down by layer by layer decomposition of task indicators and path design.Second to the task implementation stage,the use of frequent inspection and supervision and "only trace type" evaluation to urge the township government to promote the work,squeezing the township’s discretionary space;Finally,in the task assessment stage,the digital assessment method of "marking system" is used to quantify the work results of towns and villages,and the assessment results are linked to the performance of township cadres,and even the way of "one vote veto" accountability.In the face of the county-level government’s discharge and pressure,the township government has realized the transformation from result commitment to process commitment under the structural dilemma of "little power and great responsibility",and has responded to the superiors’ requirements of process assessment step by step in the process of work implementation,resulting in the "residue" behavior of avoiding responsibility.At present,the longitudinal behavior of avoiding responsibility in the field of local government governance is related to the unclear relationship between government power and responsibility,the unscientific way of supervision and assessment,and the low ability and quality of cadres and insufficient incentive.Therefore,in order to correct the vertical evasion behavior among local governments and improve the governance efficiency,it is necessary to straighten out the power and responsibility relationship between governments,adjust the task promotion and supervision and assessment mechanism within the government system,and constantly optimize the construction of local government team.Under the guidance of the pressure type system and the theory of responsible government,this paper starts from the relationship between the upper and lower levels of government,puts forward the concept of "vertical blame avoidance",constructs the analysis framework of vertical blame avoidance between the upper level and the lower level of government.Combined with the work practice of H County and town governments in Luzhou City,this paper deeply analyzes the vertical blame avoidance behavior of local governments in the grass-roots governance practice.It presents the two-way game interaction between the upper and lower levels of government in the work,which has a certain inspiration for the study of the grass-roots government behavior,and also provides a new theoretical perspective for the study of the blame avoidance behavior.However,the research in this paper still has certain limitations,failing to include more types of blame avoidance behaviors of government,and the corrective suggestions for avoidance behaviors are limited to the theoretical level.Therefore,the future research can be further deepened and expanded on this basis.