Policy Design and Social Construction amid Mass Protests
Studies on mass protests primarily examine the process, consequences and implications of protests from such angles as resource mobilization, political structure and opportunity, as well as policy frameworks, with little attention paid to the guiding role that related government policy have in dealing with mass protests. This paper analyzes the basic characters of government policies, further explains the basic logic behind their design, and takes the response to the Wukan incident as a typical case for confirmatory analysis. The study find that policy elements such as policy purpose, target groups, policy tools and executive bodies have remarkable underlying assumptions about effectiveness. If some assumptions fail to occur, policy failure is likely to appear. Therefore, in face of varying circumstances, it is recommended that policy design attach importance to elements about social construction, and adopt an open, interactive model which involves protesters in policy design.
Little Wukan, Big China: Lessons to Be Drawn from the Wukan Incident for China’s Political and Economic Development
Abstract This paper argues that the Wukan Incident reflects the common difficulties faced at the state-society level by contemporary China as the country finds itself experiencing both an important strategic chapter in its development, and a period during which social problems are coming to the fore. As such, the task of developing an understanding of the Wukan Incident offers the chance to draw crucial lessons about China’s future political and economic development. Firstly, the modernization development model, according to which economic growth and development take precedence above all else, has already led to a building up of serious social problems. China’s future development efforts must draw on and put into practice the theories of the Scientific Outlook on Development. Secondly, the demands made by the villagers of Wukan could feasibly become political and economic problems common throughout the whole country. This includes issues such as how state-owned assets and land are dealt with; transparency of public finances; and safeguards for the democratic rights and interests of Chinese citizens. The government must face these difficulties and use reforms to tackle each of them. Should it fail to do so, these issues could spark a serious social crisis or even affect the stability of the political order. Thirdly, the current mechanisms by which the Party and the government respond to the public’s interest-related claims require urgent improvement. Finally, there is no magic pill to solve the political and economic problems faced in China today. Elections are certainly not a magic solution.
Policy Punctuations in American Political Institutions
Political institutions translate inputs—in the form of changed preferences, new participants, new information, or sudden attention to previously available information—into policy outputs. In the process they impose costs on this translation, and these costs increase institutional friction. We argue that the “friction” in political institutions leads not to consistent “gridlock” but to long periods of stasis interspersed with dramatic policy punctuations. As political institutions add costs to the translation of inputs into outputs, institutional friction will increase, and outputs from the process will become increasingly punctuated overall. We use a stochastic process approach to compare the extent of punctuations among 15 data sets that assess change in U.S. government budgets, in a variety of aspects of the public policy process, in election results, and in stock market returns in the United States. We find that all of these distributions display positive kurtosis—tall central peaks (representing considerable stability) and heavy tails (reflecting the punctuations, both positive and negative). When we order institutions according to the costs they impose on collective action, those with higher decision and transaction costs generate more positive kurtosis. Direct parameter estimates indicate that all distributions except budget data were best fit by the double-exponential probability distribution; budgets are Paretian.This project was funded by the Political Science Program of the National Science Foundation, Award SES9904700. We appreciate the support of Frank Scioli, the program officer, and various political science program directors. We benefited from comments by Frank Baumgartner, John Brehm, Chris Mackie, Peter John, John Padgett, Bat Sparrow, Jim True and John Wilkerson.