Abstract
Purpose Following 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/approach Based 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 econometrics analysis method to conduct empirical research. Findings The 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/value The 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.
Highlights
Because of the rapid development of the internet, the social discourse system and the distribution of discourse power have greatly changed and so has the governance of governments
The clearer the political text is, the easier it is for the government to feel the urgent need for netizens to express their political questions, which makes the government respond faster and with high-quality content
The emotional tendency of political text had no significant effect on the speed of response, but it affected the effectiveness of response content
Summary
Because of the rapid development of the internet, the social discourse system and the distribution of discourse power have greatly changed and so has the governance of governments. In the online political deliberation process, the persuasion process of transferring information from netizens to the government should consider the expression of information and the environment in which the information is sent and the characteristics of the managers of information delivery These factors will affect the effectiveness of the government response. 4. Research method 4.1 Data sources The Chinese government attaches considerable importance to collecting and absorbing public opinions through formal channels and has established a nationwide and regional network platform for political inquiry, as well as provided timely and effective responses to address various problems related to the vital interests of the people. Stata statistical analysis software was used to investigate the text length, expression logic, emotional inclination, topic category, the time of government administration, the administrative level of the provincial and administrative objects and the influence patterns of posts on the effect of the government response.
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