在国家治理体系的微观场域中，社区是重塑城市基层社会管理体制的重要载体。社区干部是中国语境下的典型街头官僚，承担着政策执行“最后一公里”的重要职责。随着基层治理现代化的深入推进，基层治理绩效备受关注。作为一种绩效评估方式创新，第三方评估被广泛应用于基层治理实践之中。各级政府委托第三方机构围绕基层治理绩效组织开展专业化评价，第三方评估因此成为了推进基层政策执行的制度化工具。在这样的背景下，本文聚焦基层治理实践，以社区干部为研究对象，围绕第三方评估如何影响街头官僚政策执行行为这一问题展开分析。本文采用定性与定量相结合的混合研究策略。首先，采用扎根理论的程序和方法对访谈资料进行编码，提炼出初步的理论分析框架。其次，结合相关理论，修订框架并提出研究假设，阐释了第三方评估属性、激励形式、制度环境压力等对街头官僚执行行为的影响机理。在此基础上，形成第三方评估影响街头官僚政策执行行为的理论分析框架，其中：第三方评估属性和激励形式分别反映了绩效评估的测量和结果使用；制度环境压力属于场域层面的因素。接着，通过调查问卷内嵌实验设置的方式、面向社区干部收集实证数据。最后，通过多元回归分析，对分析框架中的五组研究假设进行检验。本文的研究结论有三点。第一，对于第三方评估而言，提升绩效测量的准确性、强化评估结果的使用，会对街头官僚的政策执行行为产生积极作用，表明绩效评估本身的制度安排可以促进街头官僚的执行行为。第二，场域层面的制度环境压力基本不会影响第三方评估专业性和客观性的作用发挥，但会削弱激励对于街头官僚执行行为的正向影响。第三，区分两类执行行为来看，不同影响因素产生的作用存在一定差异，反映出街头官僚复杂的行动逻辑。本文的主要研究贡献在于：（1）以第三方评估为切入点，体现了传统公共行政向现代治理的转变，促进了街头官僚理论对于治理理论的回应；（2）构建起包含绩效评估和场域因素在内的理论分析框架，分析绩效评估对街头官僚行为的复杂作用机理，增进了街头官僚理论的知识积累；（3）以社区干部这一中国情境下的街头官僚为研究对象，以街头官僚理论为分析工具，促进了基层治理研究与公共行政学经典理论的对话。
Community is the important carrier for reshaping urban management systems of primary-level social governance in the micro field of the national governance system. Community officials who are the typical street-level bureaucrats in the Chinese context, bear the important responsibility of the last step of policy implementation. With the deepening of modernization of grassroots governance, much attention has been paid to the performance of primary-level governance. As an innovative means of performance evaluation, external evaluation is widely applied in the grassroots governance practice. Third-party organizations are deputed to conduct professional evaluations about grassroots governance performance by governments, which makes external evaluation an institutionalized approach to improving frontline policy implementation. Taking community officials as the research object in the context of grassroots governance practice, this dissertation focuses on the following research question: How does external evaluation influence street-level bureaucrats’ policy implementation behavior?This dissertation adopts the mixed research strategy that combines qualitative and quantitative methods. Firstly, this dissertation encodes interview materials based on the grounded theory, and constructs the preliminary theoretical analysis framework. Secondly, based on relevant theories, this dissertation revises the framework and proposes research hypotheses. This dissertation explains the impact mechanisms of external evaluation attributes, incentive forms, institutional environmental pressure and so on. Thus, the theoretical analysis framework about how external evaluation influences street-level bureaucrats’ policy implementation behavior is established. Specifically, external evaluation attributes and incentive forms reflect the measurement and results application of performance evaluation respectively, while institutional environmental pressure is the field-level factor. Thirdly, empirical data is collected from community officials through experiment-embedded survey. Finally, five groups of research hypotheses are tested using multiple regression analysis.Conclusions are as follows. First, for the external evaluation, improving the accuracy of performance measurement and strengthening the application of evaluation results have significant positive impacts on the implementation behavior of street-level bureaucrats, indicating that the relevant institutional arrangement of performance evaluation can facilitate street-level bureaucrats’ implementation behavior. Second, in most cases, institutional environmental pressure at the field level does not influence the effectiveness of external evaluation’ professionalism and objectivity. But institutional environmental pressure can weaken the positive impacts of incentive forms on street-level bureaucrats’ implementation behavior. Third, from the perspective of two types of implementation behavior, different influencing factors have differentiated effects, which indicates the complex action logic of street-level bureaucrats. The main contributions of this dissertation are as follows. Firstly, this dissertation focuses on the external evaluation, which reflects the transformation from traditional public administration to modern governance, and promotes the response to the governance theory from the theory of street-level bureaucracy. Secondly, this dissertation establishes the theoretical analysis framework including the performance evaluation and the field-level factor, analyzes the complex mechanisms of performance evaluation on street-level bureaucrats’ implementation behavior, and promotes the theoretical development of street-level bureaucracy. Finally, this dissertation takes community officials in the Chinese context as the research object, and uses the theory of street-level bureaucracy as analytical tools, which can promote the dialogue between grassroots governance research and classical public administration theory.
