Democratic Governance: Examining the Influence of Citizen Participation on Local Government Performance in Vietnam

During the 21st century, socially equitable economic growth and sustainable human development are also goals that most countries over the world are pursuing, which emphasized the notion of “good governance”, or “sound governance”, or “democratic governance”. For Vietnam, how to promote and strengthen democratic governance must be one of the most crucial issues to achieve Sustainable Development Goals. This study is innovative as applying democratic governance to examine the influence of citizen participation on the performance of local governments in Vietnam with four different aspects: economic, institutional, political, and administrative. We employ Random Effect Model (REM) to test six hypotheses developed from the literature review. The secondary data come from four sources, including The Public Administration Performance Index, the Provincial Competitiveness Index, the Public Administration Reform Index, and the General Statistics Office of 63 provinces of Vietnam from 2012 to 2017. Some major findings: (1) citizen participation at the local level has mixed effects on institutional, administrative, and political performances; and has no significant effect on economic performance. In other words, citizen participation is positively associated with institutional and political performances but is negatively associated with individual province’s administrative performance. Particularly, under the effect of citizen participation, institutional performance can be improved more intensified than political performance. (2) The efficiency of government spending/per capita, the disparities between the Kinh people and ethnic minorities, and the regional differences between the North and the South, all of these factors influence the level of citizen participation and the performance of local government in Vietnam. This study supplements very limited literature and provides several policy implications concerning democratic governance for policymakers in Vietnam.