Online participation in the policy process: A Study of education policy in China

Abstract

The Rapid development of internet technologies brings changes to people’s daily life, as well as changes to government management, including citizens’ participation in public affairs. This research focused on citizens’ participation in public policy in the online environment. Specifically, after the summary of previous studies related to public policies and public participation, this research takes the formulation of the Chinese education policy through the online public opinion as an example to collect the relevant information through the questionnaire survey to explain the impact of Internet public opinion (cognitive level, expectation perception and social attitude) on public policy formulation (government openness and government transparency) with the consideration of the intermediary role of policy perception and citizen participation. Based on the quantitative analysis, namely reliability analysis, validity analysis, correlation analysis, and path analysis under the Structural Equation Model (SEM) using SPSS and Amos, the main findings are as follows: Cognitive level and expectation make the positive impact on both government openness and government transparency, while social attitude only makes the positive impact on government openness but not government transparency. Still, both policy perception and citizen participation play moderator roles in the process of cognitive level making positive impacts on government openness but not government transparency. g

Furthermore, combining both the empirical findings and the excellent experiences from other countries in this field, this research proposed to make efforts in the following aspects for further improvements, including strengthening the infrastructure construction and balancing information resources, perfecting the e-government platform and strengthening e-government functions, building the more comprehensive management mechanism of online public opinion, guiding the online public opinion and realizing the standardized working process, providing legislative guarantee and still technical support of online participation; and improving citizens’ political literacy of and guiding citizens’ moral compliance.