Public Voice via Social Media: Role in Cooperative Governance during Public Health Emergency.

Yingying Su,Yang Yang

doi:10.3390/ijerph17186840

Abstract

With the development of the Internet, social networking sites have empowered the public to directly express their views about social issues and hence contribute to social change. As a new type of voice behavior, public voice on social media has aroused wide concern among scholars. However, why public voice is expressed and how it influences social development and betterment in times of public health emergencies remains unstudied. A key point is whether governments can take effective countermeasures when faced with public health emergencies. In such situation, public voice is of great significance in the formulation and implementation of coping policies. This qualitive study uses China’s Health Code policy under COVID-19 to explore why the public performs voice behavior on social media and how this influences policy evolution and product innovation through cooperative governance. A stimulus-cognition-emotion-behavior model is established to explain public voice, indicating that it is influenced by cognitive processes and public emotions under policy stimulus. What is more, as a form of public participation in cooperative governance, public voice plays a significant role in promoting policy evolution and product innovation, and represents a useful form of cooperation with governments and enterprises to jointly maintain social stability under public health emergencies

Highlights

As a positive extra-role behavior, voice has attracted extensive interests from scholars and gained substantial attention in the organizational behavior literature [1,2,3]
According to the cognitive appraisal theory of emotion, under the stimulation of external the According to the cognitive appraisal theory of emotion, under the stimulation of external events, the external information obtained by individuals first enters the perceptual system for compilation and external information obtained by individuals first enters the perceptual system for compilation and processing, forming specific cognitions
Based on the results of qualitative research, this paper employs the cognitive appraisal theory of emotion to explain the process of formation of public voice behavior under public health emergencies, via the stimulus-cognition-emotion-behavior model

Summary

Introduction

As a positive extra-role behavior, voice has attracted extensive interests from scholars and gained substantial attention in the organizational behavior literature [1,2,3]. Public voice is a new type of voice behavior that refers to the behavior of citizens who share opinions on social media to improve the social status quo or prevent harmful practices [4]. As a pro-social behavior, public voice is vital for advancement and betterment of society [4], and it is believed that public voice plays an important role in the cooperative governance of government and other organizations (e.g., enterprises, non-profit organizations) under a public health emergency. In the face of extraordinary development problems, such as economic recession, public opinion in policy-making is extremely important [9]. To ensure the timeliness and efficiency of policy in the case of public health emergencies, the value of public voice, along with technical support from enterprise, should not be underestimated

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