Grassroots Governance Research: Reflections, Consensus and Prospects

As an important area of social science, grassroots governance, which becomes the nexus of state-society relations, hierarchical relations, and micro behaviors in the social sphere, is a rich deposit for interpreting China’s governance logics and attracts plenty of scholars from different fields. Due to the characteristics of both research paradigm and scholars, this field is saturated by diversified topics, methodology controversies, and competing perspectives. The research of grassroots governance pursues causal and explanatory knowledge. The academic community of grassroots governance should reach the consensus on the question formation, the analytical factors design and the methods selection based on shared macro-theories, middle-level concepts and micro-empirical propositions, exploring common mechanisms that can be embedded in the vein of the field. In the future, the local and competing mechanisms may provide factors for the academic community to further explore the general and consistent knowledge. The emergence of computational social science is expected to promote the paradigm shift, and the “general principles” of grassroots governance will most likely appear in an unprecedented form. Devoting to the paradigm shift is the academic obligation for Chinese scholars to the modernize national governance and pursue the autonomy of the social science.