The image of China’s car-hailing policy in the eyes of the public: A social media analytics perspective

Abstract

This research conducts a retrospective study of public opinion toward the Chinese online car-hailing policy, the first country to regulate the industry nationwide. In total, 41,303 microblogs are collected from the Weibo social media platform across the pre-release stage (policy agenda setting), peri-release stage (policy formulation), and post-release stage (policy implementation) of the policy cycle. A general text mining framework is proposed to extract valuable knowledge from social media text data. Topics and sentiment polarity evolutions are compared in the three policy-making stages. The findings show that citizens have always been concerned with the issues of safety, vehicle requirements, and drivers’ qualifications. During the three stages, negative sentiment recorded the highest proportion at the pre-release stage, while a decrease was observed at the peri-release stage, and then another increase was observed at the post-release stage. Additionally, opinions related to the policy stakeholders, including regulators, platforms, drivers, and passengers, were explored. Based on the results, the academic implications for policy opinion analysis and the policy implications for car-hailing regulation optimization that resolves citizens’ concerns are discussed.