Management Review ›› 2024, Vol. 36 ›› Issue (5): 248-259.

• Public Management • Previous Articles    

Objective-Tool-Effectiveness: A Three-dimensional Picture of Digital Government Construction Policies in China

Yao Yifan1, Zhang Xiang2, Ye Zhonghua3   

  1. 1. School of National Security (School of Politics, Law and Public Management), Shaanxi Normal University, Xi'an 710119;
    2. Hangzhou Institute for Advanced Study, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hangzhou 310024;
    3. School of Public Policy and Management, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049
  • Received:2022-05-04 Published:2024-06-06

Abstract: Digital government construction has become the forefront of China's modernization, and it is an important part of innovating the concept of government governance and comprehensively forming a new pattern of digital governance. To further improve the policy sys-tem of digital government construction, under the three-dimensional framework of “Objective-Tool-Effectiveness”, this paper comprehen-sively uses the content analysis method and PMC index model to conduct a quantitative inspection of 54 digital government construction policies, which were issued at the national level from 2015 to 2021. The study finds that although the policy objectives of digital govern-ment construction reflect the people-centered and data-enabled government service reform motivation, the policy tools have a wide cover-age and the overall policy effectiveness is good, there are still many problems such as inadequate diversity of policy objectives, unbal-anced structure of policy tools, and lack of policy content prediction and feedback mechanism. Therefore, we should continue to optimize the top-level design of digital government construction in China from three aspects:strengthening the big-picture thinking in policy de-sign, making full use of the policy toolbox that includes both hard and soft tactics, and maintaining general review and regular inspection of policies.

Key words: digital government, three-dimensional policy analysis framework, content analysis, PMC index model