Thesis (M.A.)--Ball State University, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Dec. 14, 2009). Includes bibliographical references (p. [42]-48).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 173-185). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis--Ph. D., University of Hong Kong, 1983. / Also availalbe in microfilm.

published_or_final_version / Housing Management / Master / Master of Housing Management

 Public participation, as a form of direct democracy, is becoming increasingly popular in the government policy-making process in China. This thesis argues that public participation in China acts neither as a supplement to a well-founded democratic system, nor as an alternative to an electoral democracy, nor even as an effective accountability politico-legal institution. Instead, contemporary public participation is an interim measure that caters to an urgent social need and provides temporary legitimacy to the state. As such, it is the first step towards further political liberalization, for which it lays a foundation. The public participation system in China has developed from its original form as a solely state-led, political campaign-oriented system in the closed era to the coexistence of three ideal-type public participation in the open era: state-led, issue-specific participation, spontaneous, issue-specific, group-based participation and spontaneous, issue-specific, individual-based participation. Public hearing, corporate lobbying and e-participation can be correspondingly treated as representative mechanisms of the three ideal-type public participation in China. In addition, the institutions of open government information and judicial redress are currently the most significant support structures for this system. Relying on the methodologies of case studies, statutory interpretation, quantitative calculation and socio-legal analysis, the thesis finds that citizens can articulate their demands on policies in public hearings, but government organs are inclined to prevent any substantial challenge to their proposed policies. Although business groups have not been conferred with any special systematic opportunity to participate in the formulation of policy, corporate lobbying contributes towards undermining the government’s monopoly in the policy-making. Citizens in e-participation take full advantage of the flexibility and anonymity of the Internet to enjoy a free, low-risk space of debating government policies and monitoring government officials. Although the implementation of the Regulations on Open Government Information has been basically satisfactory, the Regulations have failed to establish the necessary transparency for public participation. What citizens seek in public participation litigations is not only judicial redress of their grievances, but, even more significantly, de facto influence on a policy-making process taking place outside the courtrooms. The public participation system as a whole in China has a paradoxical character in contextual, structural, functional and developmental aspects. Its essential defect is to fall short of a device that makes government policymakers accountable for the output of public participation. The public participation system is used by the state as a viable trajectory for its own legitimization to secure the formal validation of government policies and to reduce the risks that it confronts in the ongoing democratization process. It is used by citizens as a locus of their self-expression values and as an incubator of their developing citizenship, also providing a prompt channel for citizens’ rightful contest. The prospects of this system and its impacts on future legitimization of the state are ultimately underpinned by citizens’ struggles for liberty and democracy, but they are directly shaped by the state’s adaptive strategy. / published_or_final_version / Law / Master / Doctor of Legal Studies

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Natural resource management requires the simultaneous consideration of many different and often conflicting goals. For resource decisions to accurately reflect public values and desires, a systematic method is needed for assessing the importance which public groups attach to different management goals. Direct judgments of the importance of goals are often used as weights in additive utility models for evaluating alternative resource decisions. The overall value of each alternative is assessed by assigning it a value with respect to each relevant goal, multiplying each value by the corresponding goal's importance weight, and summing the weighted values. The validity of this procedure depends on the assumption that each goal's importance is judged independently of all other goals and is not affected by perceived conflicts between goals. Otherwise, the importance of some goals will be overestimated (double-counted). This study tested the validity of this assumption for direct judgments of the importance of forest management goals. Subjects read a description of a hypothetical national forest and rated the importance of six forest management goals on a ten-point scale. They also rated the amount of conflict between each possible pair of goals. The management scenarios were varied to represent two levels of conflict between a wilderness preservation goal and a timber production goal, and two levels of scarcity of existing wilderness areas in the region of the national forest. The conflict and scarcity manipulations were crossed, creating four conflict/scarcity conditions in a two-by-two ANOVA design. Analysis showed that both conflict and scarcity produced effects on ratings of the management goals' importance. The effects differed depending on the nature of the individual goal. In particular, goals which conflicted with wilderness preservation were rated lower in importance when the conflict was higher and when wilderness scarcity was high. This suggests that people discount the importance of goals which are perceived as conflicting with a highly valued goal, such as wilderness preservation. Importance ratings would therefore underestimate the importance of goals such as timber production if they were used as weights in an additive utility model. Further analysis revealed the presence of a single strong dimension underlying the ratings of conflict between goals. This dimension also seemed to be related to judgments of goal importance. It is possible that both conflict and importance judgments are made with respect to general cognitive attributes of the goals (for example preservation/utilization orientation). The results of this study show that direct judgments of goal importance may not satisfy the requirements of additive utility models, and that public perception of conflict between goals must be taken into account when interpreting judgments of the importance of management goals. A resource planner must be aware of what preconceptions the public holds about conflicts between goals and how these preconceptions affect the expressed importance of the goals.

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Since its inception, online continuing education programs have experienced great variation in the degree of participation among students. There is a growing body of literature suggesting that a sense of community is a possible predictor of participation in educational programs. Since online instruction is not conducted face-to-face, direct social interaction is missing. However, there exists a variety of online instructional methods that are designed to create social interaction and thus facilitate and foster a sense of community among participants in these programs.This dissertation sought to identify a model that would suggest what variables related to a sense of community might predict participation among students enrolled in an online continuing education program. This investigation included development of an instrument to measure participants' feeling of a sense of community, and examination of the relationship of the instrument scores with three components of participation (overall participation, interactive participation, and non-interactive participation).This investigation was conducted on a two-year online continuing medical education program at a university located in the southwestern United States. The participants were physicians, nurse practitioners, and physician's assistants representing three different cohorts.Item analysis of the instrument to measure sense of community revealed a Cronbach's alpha coefficient of .89. A principal components analysis using an orthogonal (varimax) rotation produced four factors (subscales) with Cronbach's alpha coefficients ranging from .70 to .86.The overall sense of community and four subscale scores were then compared to participation scores of participants. Preliminary analyses revealed no gender or cohort differences. A significant correlation was found between communicating for understanding subscale scores and interactive participation scores. Significant positive correlation coefficients were also found between the overall sense of community score and overall participation score as well as interactive participation score.This preliminary investigation indicated that the sense of community instrument developed for this study is a reliable measure including four factors which constitute a definition of sense of community. Further, it revealed that interactive participation in the course may be predicted from communicating for understanding and that sense of community is positively correlated to overall participation and interactive participation, but not to non-interactive participation.