The effect of online political deliberation on the effectiveness of government response

Abstract

PurposeFollowing Hovland's persuasion theory, this paper aims to develop a conceptual model and analyzes characteristics of online political deliberation behavior from three aspects (i.e. information, situation and manager). Based on the whole interactive process of online political deliberation, this paper aims to reveal the key points that affect the response effect of the government from the persuasive perspective of online political consultation.Design/methodology/approachBased on more than 40,000 netizens’ posts and government responses from 2011 to the first half of 2019 of the Chinese political platform, this paper used the text analysis and machine learning methods to extract measurement variables of online political deliberation characteristics and the econometricsanalysis method to conduct empirical research.FindingsThe results showed that the textual information, political environment and identity of the political objects affect the effectiveness of government response. Furthermore, for different position categories of political officials, the length of political texts, topic categories and emotional tendencies have different effects on the response effectiveness. Additionally, the effect of political time on the effectiveness of response differs.Originality/valueThe findings will help ascertain the characteristics of online political deliberation behavior that affect how effective government response is and provide a theoretical basis for why the public should express their political concerns.

Keywords

• effectiveness of government response
• responsive government
• online political deliberation