Leveraging new media applications in response to public opinions: the Chinese county governments' performance

摘要

The age of new media brings new challenges and opportunities to governments in their responses to public opinions. This study aims at exploring the relationship between Chinese county governments' handling of public opinions and the governments' use of new media platforms, so as to understand the Chinese county governments' handling of public opinions and public sentiments in the wake of emergencies or crises. This study performed text mining on data collected from online sources of news websites and Weibo, the Chinese microblogging services. We also attempted to explore the county governments' usage of the popular mobile social network platform WeChat. Correlation analysis and cluster analysis were conducted on the governments' handling of public opinions in emergency events and the governments' usage of new media platforms. Relationships among the number of microblog postings regarding the counties of interest, the handling of public opinions by the county governments and the governments' information disclosure performance were identified. The relationship with information disclosure was especially enlightening.