Turning the Gears of Government and Society: How can Self-governing Organizations in Urban Communities Participate in Public Affairs Consultation

The participation of social organizations in community consultation is the concrete form of democratic consultation at the grass-roots level in China. Self-governing organizations in communities fully gather the endogenous forces of communities and have the potential to participate in consultative governance. Based on the practice of local governance in China, the paper puts forward "embedding-endogenous" theory from the perspective of the relationship between government and social organizations. With the website of the Ministry of Civil Affairs of the People's Republic of China as the main data source, together with the data from the websites of local Ministry of Civil Affairs, journal articles, public media materials etc., 30 self-governing organizations in urban communities are finally selected as samples after strict screening. Fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) and necessary condition analysis (NCA) are used together to explore the complex path of consultative participation of self-governing organizations in public affairs. The results show that people's organizations in communities, to a certain extent, are the necessary condition for the high degree of consultative participation of self-governing organizations. And there are four configurations that lead to their high degree of participation, namely, responsive consultation with the linkage of government and the masses, normative consultation with the integration of resources, responsive consultation with the coordination of party members, and normative consultation with the discussion of the masses under the Party's leadership. They can be further identified as cooperative consultation and leading consultation. The other two configurations lead to their low degree of participation. The most important factor to promote the consultative participation of self-governing organizations in urban communities is to drive gears of government and society to operate together, and neither side can be neglected.