More “Government”, less “Governance”: Chinese public employees’ preferences for governing public service delivery

ABSTRACT

In recent years, Chinese public sectors have adopted various innovative approaches to govern public service delivery. Using the Q methodology, this contribution examines Chinese public employees’ preferences for governing public service delivery. It identifies four institutional assemblages: dominant controller, prudent manager, equal coproducer, and coupled supervisor. It concludes that public employees in China generally have a strong preference for the integrated approach and dislike the coproduction approach and the community approach. This conclusion corresponds with general impressions on Chinese governance. This study enriches existing theoretical understandings about the governance of public service delivery and provides insights for practitioners to design appropriate institutions to achieve satisfactory public service delivery.

KEYWORDS:

• Public service delivery
• governance
• Q methodology
• China
• institutional assemblage

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The numbers between brackets refer to the statement and the factor score of the statement ranging from −3 to +3.

2 Statement z-scores show “how the archetypical respondent for each factor would sort the statements” (Zabala, Pascual, and García-Barrios 2017, 237).

Additional information

Funding

Yanwei Li is grateful for the support provided by the Education Department of Jiangsu Province (Grant No: 17KLJB620004). Shi Qiu is grateful for the support provided by the Key Project of the National Social Science Foundation (Grant No: 17ZDA101).

Notes on contributors

Yanwei Li

Yanwei Li is Associate Professor at Nanjing Normal University in China. His research interests include: governance networks, the governance of environmental conflicts, sharing economy, and the governance of risks and innovation. His research has been widely published in international journals, such as Public Administration, Policy Sciences, Risk Analysis, Public Policy and Administration, Local Government Studies, and Policy Studies.

Shi Qiu

Shi Qiu is Lecture at Nanjing Normal University in China, and his main research interests include: Chinese government and politics, public administration and social service delivery.