TITLE:
Deliberative Democracy and the Effectiveness of Community Youth-Care Policy Implementation: A Case Study of Community G in City J, Gansu Province, China
AUTHORS:
Pei Li
KEYWORDS:
Deliberative Democracy, Policy Implementation Effectiveness, Youth Care, Community Governance
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Applied Sciences,
Vol.16 No.9,
September
23,
2026
ABSTRACT: Against the backdrop of China’s shift of governance priorities toward the grassroots and the practice of whole-process people’s democracy, deliberative democracy has become an important pathway for enhancing the effectiveness of community-level policy implementation. Taking Community G in City J, Gansu Province, as a single case and focusing on its signature program “Red-Collar e-Home: Silver-Age Companionship for Growth”, this study examines how deliberative democracy empowers the implementation of community youth-care policies. The findings show that Community G has built a multi-actor collaborative structure under Party-building leadership, precisely identified and matched needs by leveraging the “Five Elders”, and standardized consultative procedures through innovations such as the “menu-ordering service” and the “three-color alert” mechanism, markedly improving the precision, coverage, and satisfaction of policy implementation. These outcomes embody an inner logic of actor coordination, value precision, organizational innovation, and emotional sustenance. The practice nevertheless faces dilemmas of limited broad participation, administrative dependence, and difficulties in quantifying effectiveness. The paper accordingly proposes optimization paths in four respects: Party-building leadership, participation mechanisms, digital empowerment, and evaluation systems, offering theoretical and practical reference for comparable communities.