By controlling the various State apparatuses, the Government is able to control the spread of social violence and ensure the effective functioning of social order. Violence is in fact a common feature of failed States, and if a society is not effectively controlled and crime is rampant, it is an absolutely destructive force for both economic development and other social construction. An effective government, however, must be one that is sufficient to control social violence.
Fourthly, government is the most important public service provider. In terms of public service and livelihood security of the whole country, the government provides effective public services through national taxation, building various institutions including education, transportation, postal services, medical services, cultural and sports facilities, etc., so as to ensure the right to survival and development of the people.
Fifthly, the government is also the most important builder of economic and social development. Liberalism believes that the government should not be directly involved in economic development and social construction, however, since the Great Depression of the last century, Keynesianism has become the main means of development for governments. The government has gradually become an important subject of all kinds of economic investment and social construction, promoting the development of the whole society by building infrastructure; promoting economic development, avoiding depressions and controlling economic risks through financial stimulus policies; and promoting innovation in science and technology by investing in technology, constantly improving the productivity of the whole society.
From each of the above perspectives, the government can be said to embody a central position in the governance of the country, so the key to good or bad governance depends on whether there is a good government, no matter what kind of national system. The Western democratic system does not necessarily imply the formation of a good government. And a non-Western system does not necessarily mean that there must not be a good government formation. This has been demonstrated in a large number of developing countries. So, in the process of the development of national governance, the government is not the product of a passive system, but the active promoter and core formulator of the system, which is extremely dynamic and plays a decisive role in the process of forming good national governance.
Third, the core elements of a good government – trust, authority and participation
Having understood the decisive role of the government in the governance of the country, it is necessary to inquire further as to how a good government can be formed and thus lead to the improvement of the governance of the country as a whole. A large number of existing institutional explorations, such as rule of law, democracy, transparency, efficiency, integrity, and oversight [[11]], remain at a superficial level. Further exploring the operational logic of a good government and the attributes it possesses, we can get three core essential features, namely trust, authority and participation.
1. Trust
The question of the legitimacy of the government is the reason why the government can hold and operate public power. In essence, throughout the ages, governments derive their legitimacy from three sources: the first is violence. At its inception, the government was the largest and most powerful violent group. Such as the establishment of Chinese dynasties, almost invariably built on the process of overthrowing the old system by a new violent group, which Tang Wu described as a “revolution” (“Zhou Yi – Ge Gua – Tuan Tuan” said: “Heaven and earth, leather and four times into, Tang Wu revolution, obedient to heaven and should be.”). . The founding of Western countries was also full of violent struggles and conflicts.
The second is the contract. Although governments rely on violence to gain coercive power, they cannot always rely on violence to achieve order and the effective functioning of society. Because relying on violence all the time will lead to the following bad consequences: firstly, it will lead to the withering of people’s livelihoods, and it will not be possible to obtain stable and reliable economic and other resource support through violent looting; secondly, it will not be possible to gain the continuous support of the people; thirdly, it will also go against the original intention of violent revolution. There are slogans like peace on earth and happiness for all as the backbone of justice. This requires an alternative to the violent order through another form, namely, contract. A contract is a steady taxation to achieve restraint against violence in exchange for public services provided by the government. Contracts take the form of constitutions and laws, which in a reciprocal capacity simultaneously constrain and safeguard the balance between government power and civil rights, creating a two-way stability and ultimately contributing to the effective construction of social order [[12]]. However, contracts are not always valid because they are static, whereas social activities are dynamic, and the government is always in a de facto superior position in the contract, which is reflected in all corners of the legislative, judicial and executive powers. This means, therefore, that the contract alone is far from solving the problem of the legitimacy of government. Contracts are only forms of reciprocal legitimacy, not real substantive legitimacy.
The third and most important source of governmental legitimacy is the trust of citizens [[13]]. Trust is a silent contract as well as a vote of the heart. When a government always does what is in the interest of the people, the people trust the government, and conversely, when a government violates the contract, breaks promises, imposes exorbitant taxes, and deceives the people at every turn, the people distrust or even hate it. When the people trust the government, the government’s decisions will be implemented smoothly, the government’s actions will be praised, the whole society’s productivity will be increased, and the people will live happily. When the people do not trust the government, what the government does will be doubted, criticized, opposed, and attacked (the so-called Tacitus Trap [[14]]), and the whole society will be full of intense conflicts and contradictions. will be fraught with human suspicion and will ultimately undermine the healthy shape of society as a whole. Thus, people’s trust in government is both the key to a good government and equally central to good governance.
While trust, as an individual’s subjective assessment of government, cannot be measured as obviously and directly as a vote, or even if it is, it is subject to great inaccuracies (people may be very reluctant to directly express their distrust of government or who should measure it), trust can be measured and observed in a variety of ways. People’s comments, public opinions about government actions, and people’s behavioral reactions when confronted with government decisions and announcements can all be used to assess the level of trust people have in a government. Thus, trust is a collective psychological evaluation shared by the vast majority of people in a society and is a macro expression of each micro-individual evaluation.
Therefore, the construction of government trust is never as relatively intuitive and simple as government investment projects to boost GDP, but in the process of subtlety, it is not only subject to the performance of the government in the large macro decision-making, but also reflected in the performance of the government in small administrative actions. Since trust is a collection of evaluations of each micro-individual, many seemingly small breaches of trust in government actions, although each involving a small number of citizens, create a state of great distrust when pooled. And the psychological trait of the people is that trust is difficult to establish, while it is easy to break trust, and long-term relationships of trust may be destroyed by one or two acts of breach of trust.
A government that is trusted will be embraced by the people everywhere, because the essence of trust lies in trusting the government to adhere to its constitutionally and legally defined duties to defend the fundamental interests of the people. And when distrust occurs, people will imagine all kinds of harm to their interests, which may not happen, but they will think of more terrible harm to their interests in terms of small governmental breaches of trust. Thus, after the establishment of a government through violence and law, the first and central task of any government governance is always to ensure that it is trusted, which is the most central task of an established government.
How, then, can a government be trusted? The building of trust is not really difficult. At its core are two things: first, strict adherence to the boundaries of the constitution and the law, which is a way of keeping the contract with the people. The second is strict adherence to its own commitments, always doing what it says it will do. These two principles are essentially one is the principle of government by statute and the other is the principle of government keeping its word. The two do not usually conflict, so if there is a conflict between the two, which principle should be followed? This entails the introduction of a third principle, namely, the fundamental principle of popular sovereignty. This is because Governments may, through the preponderance of the legislative power, adopt subsequent laws in their favour, thereby changing their original behavioural commitments. The third principle, on the other hand, always preserves the fundamental principle of popular sovereignty, which needs to be applied when there is an inconsistency between the law and the commitment, and is directly expressed in the broad participation and protection of the people’s rights in legislation.
2. Authority
Trust is the core element of good government and good governance, but trust alone is not enough, just like trusting a stone that does not change shape easily. In the midst of a series of dynamic actions, how does the government achieve good governance, which requires authority [[15]]. Authority, which is a continuation of people’s trust in the static government, is the ability that the government has and exhibits in its dynamic actions.
What is authority, authority consists of three levels, the first comes from trust in the capabilities that the government itself has, that is, because people trust the government, they also trust that the government has the ability to do its job well, that is, to achieve good governance. The second comes from people’s reliance on and obedience to capabilities that the government has not demonstrated. The government does not have complete information and resources on all public matters, which means that there is the possibility of wrongdoing, yet people still trust and obey the government’s decisions and governance, which creates a kind of obedience to government decisions and governance in unknown areas. This greater obedience, even unconditional or reduced condition obedience, constitutes the authority of the government. That is, people believe that even if they cannot be momentarily sure that the government is necessarily right, they believe that the government is largely doing the right thing, safeguarding the public interest and protecting individual rights, and so they rely on and obey, of course, authority in the larger sense of trust. Of course, authority also derives from the most basic form of legitimate violence, that is, legitimate violent punishment by the government for disobedience, which of course constitutes more the marginal boundaries of authority than it does the primary constitutive system of authority. For any civilized government is rooted in the universal consent of the people rather than in universal violence. It is also the cornerstone of the principle of popular sovereignty.
In terms of the constitution of authority, why would people believe in the credibility and usefulness of government activity in the public sphere, that is, in the dynamic capacity of government? This comes from three main sources, first, the long-term credibility of the government itself. Once a government has earned a broad relationship of trust with the people in its long-term activities, people will naturally extend it to other dynamic public spheres, although this dynamic extension is, of course, conditional, i.e., people will both dynamically extend past trust and will always re-evaluate the government’s capabilities in light of the dynamic process of governance. The second is the coercive power that the government itself possesses, both from the lawful coercive power granted by law (essentially the right to lawful violence) and from the government’s ability to mobilize resources for the larger picture. This ability to mobilize resources can ensure that the government can do better in the dynamic process of governance than ordinary social subjects can do. Third, the government’s own information-gathering capacity and scientific specialization. Theoretically, the government has better information-gathering channels than any other organizations and individuals in society, and at the same time has the most comprehensive expertise in the group’s decision-making support, thus enabling the government to make better decisions and administrative actions than any other individual or organization.
Nonetheless, theoretically, a government based on trust should be given authority to act, but this is not the case, and as mentioned earlier, globally, there are many failed governments, and questions about the authority of national governments abound. This is so, corresponding to the above three points, and also thought to have three fundamental reasons: firstly, the level of trust that the government itself has gained is not high enough. The lack of sufficient trust, and therefore the same lack of trust in the dynamics of government behavior, inherently reduces people’s willingness to obey, thus forcing governments to resort more to coercive behavior, which, in turn, reduces their authority. Second, doubts about the government’s coercive capacity, which in turn come from two sources: on the one hand, it is believed that the government does not have the kind of coercive power and resource mobilization capacity that it claims, thus believing that the government simply cannot do what it claims regardless of its own capacity and resources; on the other hand, it is believed that the government has a coercive capacity that exceeds its legal mandate, thus suspecting that the government abuses this capacity, which ultimately leads to to the detriment of the vast majority of individuals. Thirdly, there is the questioning of government information channels and scientific expertise, that is, the belief that governments at all levels may distort the collection and feedback of information for various reasons, thus misleadingly leading to wrong decisions, as well as the public’s fear that professionals who provide support for various decisions may be influenced by government to change their supposedly unbiased scientific positions.
Therefore, while good governance is inseparable from the establishment of government authority, the establishment of government authority is not always wishful thinking, but rather a reasonable expectation of the public formed by the government’s long-term actions. In order to establish good governmental authority, sustained efforts should be made in four areas. The first is to always strive to establish a credible government, which means always maintaining the public’s trust in government. The second is to always adhere to the legal boundaries of government action, because the law is the final baseline for public expectations of rational government behavior. The public’s unpredictability of government action when the government arbitrarily crosses legal boundaries makes it difficult for the public to trust the government to adhere to those boundaries when confronted with dynamic public affairs. The third is to always ensure that the government’s own institutional enforcement and resource mobilization capabilities, within the scope of legal authority, to maintain adequate government capacity, which includes the integration of resource reserves, as well as the government’s own administrative processes, personnel style, institutional development. The fourth is to maintain its own transparency, openness and communication, not only to ensure that the government is not concealed by its own subordinate branches, but also to ensure that the public can build trust through the observation of government activities, thereby objectively establishing the authority of the government.
3. participation
Participation is the sharing of public power and the opening up of the governance process. Trust and authority alone are still not enough to achieve good governance, for two reasons, one of which is that, as humanity enters modern civilization. The State has changed from the mere principle of monopoly of power to the principle of popular sovereignty, and modern civilized politics, therefore, must mean power-sharing and participation, because the people mean the majority, not the minority. The second is that trust and authority also come from participation, and without participation, trust and authority can quickly decline. Traditional feudal dynasties, in the early days, created popular trust through the monopoly of power by aristocratic groups, and authority under coercion through the divine grant of power, and through generalized violence, yet it is clear that this form of government was inefficient and ineffective in its governance. Even at a later stage, it is still necessary to achieve a stable social order through the constant inclusion of other groups in society. In the East, the process of power participation from closed to open feudalism was gradually realized, from the virtuous selection (seeking virtuousness and promoting filial piety and honesty) in the Qin and Han dynasties, to the more open system of nine products in the Three Kingdoms period, to the establishment of the imperial examination system in the Sui and Tang dynasties. In the West, from the early Greek city-state democracy, to the Roman republic, to the middle and late Dark Ages, as in England, through the Magna Carta movement in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, power was gradually shared from the monopoly of a single king and church to other marginal aristocratic groups. This all demonstrates that participation is in fact an inevitable element of governance, and that the long historical evolution has inevitably led to a process that requires a gradual transfer of power from the hands of the few to the many. Until the industrial revolution and a series of modern social revolutions erupted, the twin economic and institutional changes prompted the establishment of the bourgeois principle of popular sovereignty, and the subsequent surge of the Marxist movement established the socialist principle of popular sovereignty in a significant number of countries. To this day, the principle of popular sovereignty, whether bourgeois or socialist, has become the foundation of most countries in the world. This series of historical processes illustrates the importance of participation for effective governance, while the opposite historical lesson illustrates the serious consequences of government resistance to participation.
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