Abstract:

Responsiveness is a fundamental attribute of democratic politics. Analyzing the operational logic of government response is a key step in improving responsiveness and enhancing efficiency. The responsiveness behavior of grassroots governments often lies between “attention” and “coping”. The perspective of attention allocation provides a powerful explanation for this. Grassroots governments follow the attention allocation logic of combining authority, interests, and avoidance of responsibility, and interact with the attention of superiors, officials, media, and the public, forming an attention allocation co-shaping mechanism. Under the influence of this logic and mechanism, grassroots governments exhibit four distinct response modes with varying governance effects: movement-type, coping-type, autonomy-type, and routine-type. Grassroots governments should take people’s real needs as the benchmark for response, use the logic and mechanism of attention allocation reasonably, and pay more attention to the consistency of response intensity, the effectiveness of response content, and the timeliness of response speed.

Key words: grassroots government, government response, attention allocation, response mode