Policy Performance and Civic Trust from Citizen Perspective: Evaluating Taipei County's "Ten Mainstream Policies" from Opinion Leaders
Chih-Heng Tsai*, Hsi-Kai Chen **
Abstract
The Government of Taipei County has claimed "Ten Mainstream Policies" to be its holistic strategies for two years. The subjects of this series of policies included: 1.cooperating with Taipei City, 2.shaping high-quality culture and education, 3.being a clean government, 4.balancing the development between cities and counties, 5.constructing a convenient transportation system, 6.promoting county tourism, 7.ensuring environmental sustainability, 8.controling flood, 9.improving health and social welfare, 10.ensuring the safety of the public. From the view points of micro-performance theorists, civil trust could come from the casual mode of "recognition-satisfaction-trust" by executing and marketing government policy. The whole trust might accumulate by the trust of every single policy. Thus, we used the quantified method to measure civic trust of "Ten Mainstream Policies" of Taipei County and test the related paths of this causal model. Finally, we found that the path of "recognition-satisfaction-trust" existed and it could help predict the whole trust. Importantly, the main concern of opinion leaders is the public safety policy, which is still marked by a lackluster performance.
Keywords: Ten Mainstream Policies, micro-performance, civil trust, performance evaluation
*Assistant Professor, Department of Public Affairs, Ming Chuan University
**Chairman of Department of Business Administration, St. John's University.